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.
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
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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?
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6. Analytics Tools
The Big Three
Google Analytics
Omniture
Webtrends
A few open source choices:
AWStats
Webalizer
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.)
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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.
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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
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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?
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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?
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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.
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49. 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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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.
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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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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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