Jay Murphy, a Boston University instructor and Google Analytics pro, shows Newport Interactive Marketers how to use Google Analytics to drive ROI. Great presentation to get an understanding on how to use Google Analytics to enhance users' experience on your page.

1. Google Analytics
Jay Murphy
Trionia Incorporated – The Science of Marketing
jmurphy@trionia.com
877­234­0591

2. Agenda
Google Analytics
A Whirl­Wind Tour of Onsite SEO
Google Analytics and SEO
 Google Analytics to Start SEO
 Measuring your results
 Optimizing your results
Resources

3. Audience
Who is interested in measuring a website?
 Owners
 Online and Offline Ad Agencies
 Site Developers – Design & Technical
 Online Marketing Specialists
 Search Engine Optimization
 Search Engine Marketing
 Email Marketing
 Display Ads – and more
3

4. Answers
Question Analytics can help answer
 Who is visiting my 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?
4

5. Analytics – a brief history
Hit Counters
Log File
Page Tagging ­ Javascript/Cookies
5

6. Analytics Tools
The Big Three
 Google Analytics
 Omniture
 Webtrends
A few open source choices:
 AWStats
 Webalizer
6

7. Accuracy?
 No analytics tool is perfectly accurate –
however trends in data are the most useful
information.
 If you use two or more metrics tools do not
reconcile the data – it will be different
 If some of your metrics are critical for your
business
 For example how much advertisers pay per
click : agree on measurement in advance
7

8. GOOGLE ANALYTICS
8

9. How to Install
Google Analytics is easy to install:
 Using your Google Account, access Analytics:
http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html
 Add JavaScript code before the </head> tag
9

10. Google Analytics JS Code
 The code is:
<script type="text/javascript">
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA­xxxxxxxx­x']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async =
true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') +
'.google­analytics.com/ga.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga,
s);
})();
</script>
10

11. Installation Check
 Check on your Google Analytics
 Analytics Settings > Profile Settings >
Tracking Code
11

12. 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
12

13. 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.
13

14. 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/conc
epts/gaConceptsCookies.html#cookiesSet
14

15. Definitions
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.)
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.)
15

16. 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.)
16

17. 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.
17

18. REPORTING INTERFACE
18

19. Reporting Interface
 In your account click on the "View report" link to
see the report interface
19

20. Reporting Dashboard
20

21. Dashboard
 User Configurable view of up to 12 user defined
reports.
 All Reports – including the Dashboard
 Exported in PDF and XML format.
 Emailed – one time or scheduled
 Additional Control is offered by:
 Date Ranges
 Daily, Week or Monthly data points
 Advanced Segments
21

22. Reporting Categories
Visitors
Traffic Sources
Content
Goals
Additional Reporting Features
 Intelligence
 Custom Reports
 Advanced Segments
22

23. Visitors
23

24. Visitor Reports
Answers these questions (and more)?
 Where are my visitors coming from?
 Are they new visitors? How many are new?
 When do my visitors come to my site?
 What browsers, version of flash, java… do
they use?
 How do our visitors compare to other sites?
24

25. Visitor Reports
Map Overlay
25

26. Visitor Reports
New vs. Returning
26

27. Visitor Reports
Visitor Trending
27

28. Visitor Reporting
Browser Usage
28

29. Traffic Sources
Answers these questions:
 Where did people find out about my site?
 What proportion of visitors come to the site:
 Directly, through search engines and
through referral websites?
 For search engine traffic – what keywords?
 Which referrals provide the ‘best’ traffic?
 What campaigns are most effective?
29

30. Traffic Sources
Overview
30

31. Traffic Sources
Search Engines
31

32. Traffic Sources
Keywords
32

33. Traffic Sources
Referring Sites
33

34. Traffic Sources
Direct
34

35. Content
Answers these questions:
 What are the entrance pages (landing pages)?
 What keywords were used to reach these
pages? Or what or referrals?
 Where did people leave the site? (Exit Pages)
 Further detail to determine if a user goal
was satisfied or it was a failed visit.
35

36. Content
Overview
36

37. Content
Navigation Summary
37

38. Content
Entrance Keywords
38

39. Content
In­Page Analytics
39

40. Goals, Custom Reports, Advanced Segments and Data Access API
OTHER TOPICS
40

41. Goals
Used to track specific actions on your website.
These can be:
 Site registration
 Sign up for a download, webinar, newsletter…
41

42. Setting up Goals
Step ­ 1
42

43. Setting up Goals
Step ­ 2
43

44. Setting up Goals
Step ­ 3
44

45. Setting up Goals
Step – 4
45

46. Goals on all Reports
46

47. Integrating with Ad Words
 Link AdWords and Analytics accounts together
 One AdWords with one Analytics account.
 One account for each client
 Autotagging helps analytics track your AdWords
clicks.
 This adds a gclid value to your query string
http://mydomain.com?clid=1234321
47

48. AdWords
Reporting
48

49. Other Ad Sources
 Use the Google URL builder
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578
49

50. 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.
50

51. Custom Reporting
51

52. Custom Reporting
Dimensions & Metrics
52

53. Custom Reports
Dimensions & Metrics
Dimensions Metrics
 Visitor  Visitor
 Campaign  Campaign
 Content  Content
 Ecommerce  Ecommerce
 Internal Search  Internal Search
 Custom Variables  Goals
 Events  Events
 AdWords
53

54. Custom Report
Example – Avinash Kaushik
54

55. Advanced Segments
55

56. Advanced Segments
56

57. Data Access API – from PHP
GAPI – Google Analytics API PHP5 Interface
 Supports arrays for Dimensions and Metrics
 Returns results in a PHP object
 Date ranges and filtering provided
For more detail see:
http://code.google.com/p/gapi­google­analytics­
php­interface/
57

58. Data Access API – from PHP
Sample Code
$ga = new gapi('email@yourdomain.com','password');
$pId = 11223344; // Profile ID
$metrics = array('country','city');
$dimensions = array('pageviews','visits','newVisits');
$ga­>requestReportData($pId,$metrics,$dimensions);
foreach($ga­>getResults() as $result) {
echo '<strong>'.$result.'</strong><br />';
echo 'Pageviews: ' . $result­>getPageviews() . ' ';
echo 'Visits: ' . $result­>getVisits() . '<br />';
echo 'New Visits: ' . $result­>getNewVisits() . '<br />';
}
echo '<p>Total pageviews: ' . $ga­>getPageviews() . ' total
visits: ' . $ga­>getVisits() . '</p>';
58

59. WHIRL WIND TOUR OF SEO
59

60. Whirl­Wind Tour of Onsite SEO
Content is King – with SEO we can get caught up in
optimizing for key words and search engines
We can forget about the people!

61. Whirl­Wind Tour of Onsite SEO
(continued)
In order of priority update the following:
 Titles
 Meta Descriptions
 Headings
 Content
 Links
 Images
 Page Speed
 Meta Keywords

62. Whirl­Wind Tour of Onsite SEO
(continued)
Titles
 Use short titles that include the keyword(s) at
the start. (50 to 80 characters)
Meta Descriptions
 The content that will frequently show up in
your search results – use keywords naturally
in your description. (160­180 characters)

63. Whirl­Wind Tour of Onsite SEO
(continued)
 Headings
 Use the main keyword for the H1 tags and
lower priority keywords for H2 and H3 tags.
 Images
 Use keywords in your alt tags as well as
naming the images with your keywords. So
images names like this are good:
newport­harbor­view.png

64. Whirl­Wind Tour of Onsite SEO
(continued)
 Links
 Use links to connect to reputable sites. Also
link internally to related pages. Use keywords
in your links:
<a href=“tropical­fish.html”>See our list
of tropical fish</a>
 Content
 Include keywords throughout your content, in
a natural way. Do not force or ‘keyword
stuff’.

65. Whirl­Wind Tour of Onsite SEO
(continued)
Page Speed
 Fast load time is critical for user experience.
 A factor in Search Engine Optimization.
Performance techniques include – CDN, CSS
sprites, compressed JavaScript and more.
Meta Keywords
 While less important – it is good to have a list
of 12­15 descriptive keywords in the page
meta keywords tag.

66. More on SEO
Off­site SEO – inbound links
 Look to social websites to get started
SEO related to SEM (paid keywords)?
 Not on Google; Yahoo? Maybe
Setup a sitemap.xml and a robots.txt
Other factors:
 Age of site, number of pages, internal links…

67. SEO Summary
How do we determine our keywords?
 Some people call this process keyword
harvesting.
The next section will show how to use Google
Analytics (and other tools) to start harvesting.

68. ANALYTICS REPORTS TO
START AN SEO PROJECT
68

69. Keywords
Helpful – but these are all ‘branded’ keywords

70. Non­Branded Keywords
Using the report filters we can create a ‘non­
branded’ keyword report:

71. ‘Group’ Keywords
To find related keywords we can create an
‘Advanced Filter’ in this case we want to see all
non­branded keywords with the word ‘visit’
included.

72. Google’s Keyword Tool
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

73. Other Sources for Keywords
Competitor research
 Examine the structure and keywords used by
competitor websites
 Use services like Compete or Alexa to
determine
Brainstorm Keywords
 Ask customers and/or sit down and write as
many keywords as you can imagine.

74. Keyword Baseline Results
http://www.mikes­marketing­tools.com/ranking­reports/

75. ANALYTICS REPORTS TO
MEASURE ONGOING SEO
75

76. Traffic Sources
First look at percentage increase in Search Engine Traffic
 This provides a high level look at overall traffic.
 Then check the search referrals in more detail.

77. Search Engine Traffic
Look at the ‘non­paid’ traffic sent to the website.
Look for gains to indicate SEO improvements.

78. Landing Pages
The landing pages indicate which pages on your
site get direct traffic from search engines (and
other sources)

79. Landing Page Keywords
The entry keywords tell you both what is working
and what can be optimized further.

80. Advanced Segments
80

81. Advanced Segments
81

82. ‘Restaurant’ Segment
We can view behavior of this segment.

83. ‘Restaurant’ Segment

84. SEO Rank Report?
How can you see where your terms are ranking?
 Applying three filters to a new profile will
provide the answers.
 First filter to include Google traffic
 Then filter to keep organic traffic
 Finally use a custom filter to provide a
ranking report

85. Filter Detail
 The three filters are:
Filter Type: Custom Filter
Select "Include"
Filter Type: Custom Filter
Filter Field:Campaign Source
Select "Include"
Filter Pattern: google
Filter Field:Campaign Medium
Filter Pattern: organic
Filter Type: Custom Filter
Select “Advanced"
Field A ->Extract A: Referral : (?|&)q=([^&]*)
Field B ->Extract B: Referral : (?|&)start=([^&]*)
Output To -> Constructor: User Defined : $A2 (page: $B2)

86. SEO Rank Results
The output can then be seen in the ‘user defined’
reports – which will then show the page for each
organic keyword:

87. Page Load from Analytics
 The new version of Google Analytics (in
Beta)includes tracking Page Load speed.
 Simply adding this new line of code to your
Google Tracking will allow reporting on page load
speed:
_gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);
 The new ‘Site Speed’ report will now provide
speed statistics on your website.

88. Sample Site Speed Report

89. QUESTIONS?

90. To Learn More
 CDIA BU is offering two Analytics Courses
 Google Analytics for Business :
Introduction
 When: Friday, July 15, 2011
 Google Analytics for Business : Advanced
 When: Friday, July 29, 2011
REGISTER ONLINE

91. Analytics Resources
 Blogs
 Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik
 Books
 Web Analytics Demystified – Eric T. Peterson
 Web Analytics an Hour a Day – Avinash
Kaushik
 Education
 Google’s Conversion University

92. 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 Non­Profits
92

93. 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

94. Online Marketing – B2C
CASE STUDY
94

95. B2C
Banner Advertisement & Pay
per Click
Metrics
Visits
Coupon Prints
Sales
95

96. Targeting
The Campaign used two types of targeting
 Geographic
 West coast of Florida
 Keyword Based
 Diabetic
 High Fiber
 Whole Grain
 Flax Seed
96

97. Metrics
Keyword Performance
97

98. Metrics
Ad Performance
98

99. Landing Page Optimization
A/B Testing
No Email Signup Original
Conversion Rate 23.9%% Conversion Rate 17.45%
99

100. Campaign Summary
100

101. Campaign Summary
Results
Florida banner advertisements led to additional direct
and indirect website vistors.
101