1. Take action
from your
Google
Analytics!
Rachel Wright
University of Minnesota
College of Continuing Education
2. Use Analytics to discover…
• Whether your site is performing for you
– what are the measureable outcomes?
• What is driving visitors to your site
– Which marketing tactics are driving high-
quality traffic to your site?
3. What We Know Now
Marketing Activity →Conversions
Online
Tactics Result
Traffic
4.
5. Use Analytics to break it down!
Tactic 1 Traffic Activity Results
Tactic 2 Traffic Activity Results
Tactic 3 Traffic Activity Results
6. Easily segment your traffic
Online Ads Traffic Activity Results
Direct Mail Traffic Activity Results
E-mail Traffic Activity Results
9. Four types of goals
• URL destination
– thank you or confirmation page
• Visit duration
– stayed on your site for X time
• Page/Visit
– visited X pages in their visit
• Event*
– Triggered an event such as a video
*must have event tracking configured
10. Goal set-up
• Set up per profile
– Must have administrative access
– 20 goals, broken into four sets of five
• Each individual goal can only be
accomplished once per visit!
14. Find out:
• Which channels perform best?
– Create an even playing field for social, e-
mail, direct mail, search, etc.
– Track traffic volume AND quality!
• Goals accomplished
• Which campaigns perform best?
• Where should I allocate more of my
marketing resources?
15. Campaign tracking set-up
• Append javascript tags to the end of
landing page URLs: unique tag per
tactic
• Tells Analytics which tactic drove the
visit, and what categories that tactic
fits into
16.
17. Tagged Parameters
Required
• Source: what is the referrer?
• Medium: what type of tactic is it?
– e.g., online ad, e-mail, direct
mail, cpc, broadcast ad, etc.
• Name: which tactic is it?
– e.g., august 16 info session direct mail piece
Optional
• Ad: which creative execution is it?
– Use for A/B testing of ad creatives.
• Term: which keyword triggered the ad?
– Use for PPC analysis.
23. Quick Recap:
Campaign Tracking
At a glance, find out
• which tactics are driving traffic
• which marketing channels are driving
traffic
AND
• which are driving high-quality traffic (non-
bouncing)
AND (together with goal tracking)
• which are converting the best!
24.
25. PLUS: Use other reports better
View campaign traffic in context
all other e-mail
2% 4% search
advertising
5%
unknown
36%
referral
23%
organic
search
30%
26. And MORE…
• Goal reporting
– Funnels: where is traffic stopping out?
• Visitors Flow
• Multi-Channel Conversions
– 30-day lookback window
• Custom reporting
27. Combine with outside data!
• Combine with cost data to calculate
cost per non-bounce visit
– For individual tactics AND entire channels
28. Tips
• Do not use campaign tagged links on
internal links to your site!
• Link your Adwords/Analytics
accounts—ads will be auto-tagged!
• Goal is attributed to final campaign!
– Multi-channel conversions show “assists”
• Ensure consistent tag typing in the URL
Builder!
– Allows for identical mediums, sources to
be grouped together
29. Implementing campaign
tracking
• Data-driven marketing culture
• Started with one program area
• Trained staff for college-wide usage
– agreed taxonomy for
source, medium, campaign
• Quarterly, then semi-annual meetings
– showed results
– provided feedback
30. Do more with Analytics!
• Track events
– Video plays
– PDF downloads
– Outbound clicks
• Track site search
– What are visitors having trouble finding?
– Trend analysis
• Create profiles with filters
– remove internal traffic
– combine uppercase/lowercase rows
31. Helpful resources
• Google Analytics Help: About Goals
http://goo.gl/jvazn
• Configuring URL Destination Goals
http://goo.gl/BPHAN
• Analytics Blog on how to set up goals
(helpful examples, written in 2009 so
interface is slightly different than
shown) http://goo.gl/EC9UZ
• Link tagging cheat sheet (hand-out)
Get a sense of if and how they are using analytics now.Who is using web analytics?Who is using Google Analytics?Using goals in Analytics?Using campaign tagging to tag inbound links?Ask questions at any time.
Hopefully we all have a sense of this. In total, we executed these tactics, saw this much web traffic, and these many results (leads generated, registrations, etc.)
The eternal marketing question: which half of my advertising is working?
What I’m going to be talking about is how to use Analytics to break down web traffic and resulting online actions by individual tactics. And, importantly, we can see what other pages they visited, videos viewed, etc., before accomplishing the actions. We’re better able to connect the dots between tactic, resulting visits, activity, and accomplishing our goals.
Also, with one click in Analytics, you can break down results into larger buckets: online ads, direct mail, e-mail, broadcast ads, pay-per-click, etc., etc.
First, let’s take a quick look at how to quantify these “results.” Recommended, use the “Goals” functionality in Analytics—reporting is located under the “conversions” area, in the Analytics navigation.
URL Destination: you tell Analytics, when they hit X page, they’ve accomplished the goal.
At our continuing education unit, 20 goals was not enough. We’ve set up a profile for each type of program (prof development, personal enrichment, and degree and credit), and we’ve also set up a more general profile that uses broadly defined goals. Can have up to 50 profiles.Keep in mind though that each goal can only be accomplished ONCE per visit. So, if you have one goal that covers thirty different request pages, and you want to know how many different requests visitors are making, you have to define each goal separately.
If you can put analytics code on all of your pages in your purchase process, you can Can specify funnel pages per goal—helpful to know where people are stopping out.
So now we have the actions defined as goals. Let’s take a look at the beginning of the funnel—using campaign tracking to define which traffic is coming from which tactic.
For each marketing tactic, you will create a different javascript tag that will be appended to the landing page URL. Regardless of whether the user’s browser passes on referrer data, Analytics will know where the visit came from, and additional information about that tactic.
Use the URL Builder--Google has a helpful online tool, where you can type this information in and generate a tagged URL.
These are the parameters you can define for each tactic. Rooted in PPC analysis. For Google Adwords: source is google.com, medium is cpc, ad corresponds to the ad creative, term is the keyword that triggered the search, name is the Adwords campaign name.
Situation:We’re running an ad on Startribune.com for our November 9 information session.landing page (cce.umn.edu/achieve)source (star tribune dot com)medium (online ad)tactic (dcp-0541-08--number from our project management system—nov 9 info session star tribune online adHit Generate URL
You can see that the information is actually embedded in the tag.In a case like this, with an online ad, it doesn’t matter that this is probably the most unattractive URL on the planet. But in some cases, like direct mail, you need an easily type-able URL, so you may want to create a vanity URL that points to this one, such as:
This is a report of October traffic on the cce website. Seeing: overall results from all tagged links (all marketing campaigns). Below, the results from individual tactics: visits, pages/visit, average visit duration, % new visits, and bounce rate. Discuss bounce rate.
Can also view by medium, so you can judge what type of tactic is sending traffic to your site. Useful for resource allocations within the department.
Combine with Goals: Can also rank by goal conversion rate (within campaign report, can only rank within one set of goals at a time).Credited to last source and medium that sends the traffic.
If you aren’t tagging your campaigns, then they’ll show up as either unknown or referral.
Visitor Flow: can build a custom segment for a campaign, and view visitor path information.Multi-channel conversions: how do the channels combine (direct mail, followed by e-mail?) within 30 days? Goal is credited to final channel
Easier when there’s just one of you doing it. Five different people who are each tagging a large number of tactics. Had to be consistent, and get buy-in from them that this extra step in the initial process was worth it.