I was thinking about the LunaMetrics Blog survey. Quite a few people have taken it, but I’d like to get another fifty responses before publishing.

I considered (and discarded) these thoughts:

• You owe it to the blog writers. No, let’s face it: you don’t owe anything. We’ll keep doing great content, and we really don’t know anything about who replies (unless they actually sign their name, which a couple of people did). So we’ll never know if you answered or not.
• You aren’t getting paid for it, so why should you? Good point. So you see why I discarded this one.
• You’ll be able to influence some of the things we write, or at least, how we write them. Well, that’s like saying you will have a chance to win a free iPod. You might win, but your chances are diluted by the number of others who answered. And when was a potentially free iPod the reason that you did something, anyway?

No, it seems to me that there is only one good reason to answer our survey: this is what analysts do. They understand that data is sacred, and that not having enough of it is aggravating. So if creating data is something an analyst can do, we do it.

I hope you’ll understand how important having enough data is, and you’ll take our short, completely anonymous survey.

Take the LunaMetrics Blog survey

Thanks!

Robbin

Ever need 30 profiles, each with the same 4 goals? Me too. Unfortunately, Google Analytics doesn’t include an easy way to manage goals.

So, here’s the Firefox extension I created to speed up the process of copying goals. We’ll just call it “GoalCopy”.

What it does

The Goal Copy extension records all of the values in a Google Analytics Goal Settings form. You can then navigate to another profile where you want to put that copied goal and paste all of those values into the new form. That way, you can get your goals from one profile to another without all the tedium.

When you install it, it will create a new toolbar with 4 sets of copy/paste buttons. Each set will copy and paste a different goal of your choice. The toolbar can be toggled on/off with View -> Toolbars -> GA GoalCopy

How to use it

1. After installation, navigate your Firefox browser to an existing Google Analytics Goal Settings form.

2. Click one of the four Copy Goal buttons on the Goal Copy toolbar.

3. The name of the Paste Goal button will change to show the name of the goal you copied. If the name of your goal was “Subscribe to Newsletter” then the Paste Goal button will display “Paste: Subscribe to Newsletter”

4. Go to another profile and navigate to a Goal Settings form page where you’d like to use your newly copied goal.

5. Click the Paste button to populate the new goal form with the values from copied goal.

6. Remember to scroll down and click “Save Changes” on the form.

That’s it. You now have your new profile ready to collect goal conversion data.

Notes

Buttons are grayed-out when not on a Goal Settings page.

There are 4 Slots to save goals in. Each set of Copy/Paste buttons uses its own slot.

Clicking Copy Goal again overwrites the previously saved goal for that slot.

Goals are saved persistently. Closing your browser does not erase your saved goals.

When clicking from a tab that is still Loading to a Goal Settings tab, the buttons will not re-enable properly from their grayed-out state – just click on a tab that is fully loaded (or blank) and then back to the Goal Settings tab to enable the buttons.

Requires Firefox 2.0.*

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who provided testing and feedback, including Jason Green here at LunaMetrics, Justin Cutroni at EpikOne, Shawn Purtell at ROI Revolution, and Mike Plummer at POP (sorry for not getting it out earlier that day, Mike).

Installation

Open this link in Firefox

Then click Install Now.

Depending on your setup, Firefox may want to download the file instead of installing it directly. Just select “Open With. . .” and choose Firefox from the list of applications.

Alternate Version

If you’re having problems with the toolbar being greyed-out on the ‘Edit Goals’ form page, try this version that never disables the toolbar buttons.

These changes have been incorporated into the latest version and are part of the goalcopy.xpi file.

-John Henson

The Problem

Do you sometimes want a second report filter at the bottom of your keyword reports?

I do. Every time I want to see phrases containing a particular word, but not containing branded keywords. For example, I might want to see all searches containing “conversion”, but not “lunametrics conversion.” It is a recurring theme for me.

The Solution

So what do you do? It’s called a Lookahead, and it comes in two versions. Positive Lookahead and Negative Lookahead. And we can chain together as many as we want.

Let’s say I want to find all keyword phrases that contain conversion and contain website but do not contain lunametrics. Here is what I’d type into the report filter:

^ (?=.*conversion)(?=.*website) (?!.*lunametrics).*$

The (?! begins a negative lookahead (must not match) and a (?= begins a positive lookahead (must match). The regular expressions inside the lookaheads can be as complex as you want. But if you just want to follow the formula I used here. . .

The Recipe

1. Start with ^
2. Place each word you don’t want inside a Negative Lookahead : (?!.*word)
3. Place each word you do want inside a Positive Lookahead: (?=.*word)
4. Chain together as many of each as you want
5. Finish up with .*$

Caveat

This example will match anything with “website” in it anywhere. If you want to match exactly “website” and not “websites” or “123website”, use (?=.*\bwebsite\b) instead.

So yesterday, the new year started in force, and our team sat down to talk about our blog (and what kind of posts we would like to do in the coming months.) “Well, what do our readers care about?” one person asked. “Who are they?” Hmm, I thought, I really have very little idea. So here is our first little survey (and it really is little — just four or five questions, depending on how you count them. None are mandatory, because don’t you just hate when you give freely of your time and they force you to answer things you don’t want to answer?) Please please please take a minute or two to fill this out. We write a lot, but only know that we’re helping when you talk to us.

Take the LunaMetrics Blog survey

Many thanks to Taylor and Traci, John and Jason. I know you guys won’t think that I took any of your advice, but I really did.

- Robbin

Finally, you’re on the front page of Digg! You’re server is hopefully prepared to handle the ridiculous amount of traffic it is about to see today. You check back in the next day to see how many new orders you have. Think about the possibilities: 10,000 visitors with your 4% conversion rate. You finally bring up the report…nothing. In fact, your conversion rate is probably lower than usual.

Writing that social media whale that will bring in thousands of visitors to your site is hard. You have to research the hook that will be most successful for your niche, and then successfully market it to get on the front page of Digg, Reddit, Mixx, or other social media sites. Despite the opportunities social media gives you, I still hear the same complaint over and over: the traffic doesn’t convert.

It is easy to understand your conversion concerns with social media. You probably wonder, “what good is all of that traffic if 0.01% of it actually buys something or clicks on one of my ads? I’d rather have my resources used on strategies that will get people to buy more.” But what so many people fail to realize is: social media marketing is not about conversion, it is about links.

The links that you get from a successful social media campaign will help you rank higher for your targeted keywords that will bring in the traffic that actually converts. Don’t expect any of the thousands of visitors you receive from Digg to convert, but you should expect them to link to your site from their blogs and from their websites. These links can easily be enough to take you straight to the first position for your most important keywords. Next thing you know, more and more of your quality traffic is converting.

A great way to filter out all of this non-converting traffic is to setup a filter in your Google Analytics. First, create a new profile so you still have that main profile that shows everything. Next, add a custom filter to get rid of all of the social media traffic coming your way:

Now your new profile will display all of the traffic and conversion rates, minus all of the non-converting traffic from social media. See how your traffic from the Search Engines improves, and how it affects your goals. You’ll be amazed at the indirect benefit social media can create for you.

“You really mix it up, Robbin, don’t you?” LunaMetrician Jason Green joked as he unpacked box after box of Melitta’s Breakfast Blend javapods.

“Well, that’s what you guys drink,” I answered. But in fact, that wasn’t the main reason that I bought all Breakfast Blend. Melitta just didn’t have the information that I needed to distinguish between their products. And I saw the same problem with the user tests we did in December, for a completely different kind of customer.

The problem was that the Melitta site made it too hard for me to buy anything else. I would have loved to try some new stuff, but all those coffee words didn’t mean anything to me.

For example, one of the flavors was, “A Cafe Kind of Day.” The description is, “The forecast calls for smooth and satisfying. The 100% Colombian brew delivers a subtle, wine-like overtone from daybreak to nightfall. Each box contains 18 pods. Fits all Coffee Pod Brewers.”

Seems simple? Not to me. I want to hear, “This is the perfect cup of coffee when you have that mid-afternoon sleepy feeling.” Or, “Just awesome when you crave something as dark as espresso, but can’t get to your machine.” I need some way to differentiate this kind of coffee from “Breakfast Blend.” With Breakfast Blend, I understand one important feature: it is for drinking in the morning. All those other blends — I just couldn’t tell the difference.

This is the same issue I saw last week in user testing. We had a site with product after product, and they were so similar. The owner certainly understood how and when to make a selection, because he knows the product selection intimately. Some of the users, however, were overwhelmed. He needed to tell them when to choose each one — just like Melitta needed to tell me how to choose a flavor of coffee.

Next time, I am going to find a site that has compatible coffee pods, and that tells me what to buy, and why. And we’ll try something new.

Robbin

Do long search phrases convert better?

This was what I wanted to find out for a particular client, but it took some work. I used a regular expression in the Keywords Report of Google Analytics to filter by the number of terms in the Keyword Phrase. The exported results showed a clear increase in conversion rate as the number of search terms increased.

This client was doing far better with searchers who were using a lot of terms. They were being specific! They knew just what they were looking for and were ready to buy. This data put additional power behind recommendations concerning content, search engine optimization and paid search strategies.

1 .59%

2 .60%

3 .90%

4 1.17%

5 1.06%

6 1.22%

7 1.88%

8 3.33%

Even though there were a lot of people using long search phrases, this data was obscured. As the number of terms increased, the number of people searching for exactly that phrase decreased. This resulted in none of the individual phrases seeming to count for much. The so-called Long Tail.

You really have to dig to find these sorts of gems but they are invaluable in the pursuit of providing information that can be acted upon.

A tool for digging

The tool is a Regular Expression, a pattern matching language. If you’re not already familiar with it, there is a great series of articles right here on the LunaMetrics blog.

Here is what I used:

^([\\+*"*\\s*,*'*\\-*]*\\w+\\b\\s*[\\+*"*\\s*,*'*\\-*]*){3}$

It accounts for the most common characters I’ve found between words.

Steve (see comments) pointed out a great way to shorten my expression by using the \W character set. Here is what it looks like.

^(\\W*\\w+\\b\\W*){3}$

\W is shorthand for all non-word characters

How do I use it?

I know this may look like gibberish but keep reading — you don’t need to understand it to get some use from it.

In Google Analytics, go to Traffic Sources > Keywords and paste the Regular Expression into the box at the bottom of the data. Just change the {3} to whatever number of terms you want to see and click the GO button.

A brief look at the RegEx

Although this is not strictly a Regular Expression post, I feel obligated to include a basic glance at the different parts of the expression. Feel free to skip this if you just don’t care.

^ anchors the beginning of the match to the beginning of the string

( ) used to group a set of items together for a match

[\+*"*\s*,*'*\-*]* This group matches any number and any order of + ” , – ‘ and whitepace (\s). It is what handles all the characters that might end up separating different search terms.

\w+ Matches 1 or more alphanumeric characters (the \w is another pre-defined set of characters like \s)

\b Match for a word boundary. It forces the \w characters to be separated by something. Otherwise the expression will match any string of characters longer than {3}.

{3} Requires exactly 3 of the above sequence so it would match the phrase one two three but not one two three four

$ anchors the end of the match to the end of the string

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

You can’t account for every situation. For example, sometimes ‘ is meant as an apostrophe and sometimes “-” is used as a hyphen. In the end the impact is usually small – just 2-3% of the search phrases were affected in my case and they just get bumped to the next higher match instead. (For example, non-glare window would match at {3} instead of {2})

It is an interesting way to look at keyword data and maybe you’ll get some use from it– if you do, let me know.