Archive for May, 2010
Posted on May 27, 2010 by Jonathan Weber
I’ve written a post in the past about problems with data in Google Analytics funnel reports, but this is one I just remembered that isn’t covered there.
Have you ever seen a funnel like this one?
What’s up with that second step, the one with no label?
The answer is that the funnel was changed during the time period we’re looking at. At some point, there was a step here, where there were 42 visits that went through that step. But the way the funnel is set up now, that step isn’t included any more.
You can make the weirdness go away by only looking at date ranges that are completely before or completely after you made the change.
So, if you’ve seen this, I hope this helps you figure out this head-scratcher.
When you make changes to your goals or funnels, you might also want to make an annotation of when that happened to keep track of the date and share it with the others who are looking at your analytics.
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics
Posted on May 24, 2010 by Robbin Steif
Our old website had one of the worst bounce rates I ever see. (And the design was so 1999….)
Nevertheless, I put up with it for a long time, because who has time to write and design a new site? That is, until I tried usertesting.com, a story I wrote about last summer. (The short version: it was one thing to see the bounce rate in GA and know in your heart of hearts that you have to fix it. It was quite another to hear people tell me that the only site we were neglecting, our own, was significantly less than wonderful.)
The redesign took almost an entire year. Let’s face it, customers came first. But as we did the redesign, we listened very closely to the things that we heard in our first set of user tests. The most important lessons they taught us were the same ones we try to teach our customers:
- They wanted to understand what we did immediately (i.e. within five seconds)
- They wanted text they could skim
- They wanted to see pricing
- They wanted to know more About Us
So we worked it (and it was hard — we wanted to create text that customers could scan, but not lose rankings. We wanted to talk About Us but not be All About Us.)
At this point, we have only a week of data. Not exactly statistically significant, but I can see that our bounce rate for the site (i.e. not including our blog) went from somewhere in the high 60′s to somewhere in the low 40′s. (I highlighted the comparisons in the two screen shots.) We did the identical user tests as before, and while we still got some criticism, we also got a lot of compliments.
More later, when we have more data. I am especially looking forward to see if/why/whether the decrease in bounce rate on blog pages keeps up too.
Robbin
View Comments (6 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Google Analytics, Usability
Posted on May 20, 2010 by Robbin Steif
Last year, when I started working on an eBook for Google Analytics and Regular Expressions, one of my acquaintances wrote, “That’s so 2008.” (And just think, now it is 2010.)
So I put it all on the shelf for a while, until Nick M and Avinash did this video and addressed RegEx (Regular Expressions) again. Hmm, I thought. Well, I use them all the time. And people write me with their RegEx and say, “Please help me troubleshoot them” all the time. And then I saw a plea for help on a bulletin board. And finally, when Nick and Avinash did that Nick-and-Avinash show referenced above, I thought, time to finish this ebook.
So here is my guide to Regular Expressions (including the cartoon characters) . You can download it, or read it in html.
I know that there is one design error, but I don’t want to fix it yet again until a lot of you RegEx fans get a chance to read and comment.
All thoughts are welcome. And remember what David Meerman Scott says: On the Internet, you are what you publish.
Robbin
View Comments (8 Responses) | Categories: Regular Expressions
Posted on May 17, 2010 by Christina Keffer
Hi all!
Here is the long-awaited continuation of my first post about driving traffic through social media links.
I had covered all this theory about the differences between social media link building and traditional link building, and now I’m going to move onto specific strategies!
Specific Social Media Link Building Strategies
Strategy #1: The Retweet
Ah, the Retweet, most coveted of all Twitter responses. Getting retweeted means that someone sees what you said and retweets it, sharing it with their list of followers, thus giving your tweet (and the link that you included in it) much more exposure.
The first step is finding those that are most likely to retweet your tweets. One way to do this is to go to twitter and type “rt + keyword” (where keyword is whatever it is that you’re promoting.) The result is that you see the abbreviation rt, short for retweet, as well as the keyword that you’re interested in which shows everyone who has retweeted tweets with the same keyword. Those who retweet your friends are your friends. You just don’t know them yet.
Another method that is useful to find retweeters is using Twitter Grader to find tweeters in your area. This is especially helpful if you’re a local store or chain promoting something that is geo-specific.
Keeping your tweets under 120 characters is important. “But the limit is 140 characters!” you say. Well, you’re right, it is. However, if you keep your tweet to less than 120 characters, it gives people a chance to retweet it without editing it. Remember, every time it gets retweeted, Twitter ads a few characters. Often, the first thing to get edited out of an interesting tweet is the link that you put in it. Bad deal.
You can use Bit.ly to help you find popular Tweeters. I could write an entire blog article about this step alone, but fortunately Jim did it for me. Check it out. He is the Bit.ly master.
Last but not least, do unto others as you would have them do unto you! If you want to be retweeted, retweet your target tweeters tweets! (If you REALLY want retweets, take a video of yourself trying to say that last sentence 5 times fast and post it to Youtube. Don’t forget to tweet the links.)
What To Do When You’ve Targeted Your Tweeter!
Now that you’ve targeted your Tweeter, here’s some tips on how to ensure they’ll actually want to retweet you:
Stalk the target: No, not in the creepy way. Just monitor them on Tweetdeck or Twhirl or your favorite Twitter app and pay attention to what they retweet. Is it funny stories? News articles? Products? Learn about their activities and their preferences so that you can figure out what it is that they’ll likely retweet.
Now, instead of bombarding them with links in an obvious ploy to hock your wares, start a conversation with them. Tell them how interested you were in their last retweet. Follow them (gasp!) Yes, I said follow them. If they’re retweeting stuff that is similar to what you have, they obviously are closely related enough to your interests to follow them.
When they mention something that relates to your site or your promotion or your sense of humor or whatever, THEN you plug your link. If you’ve already begun a relationship with them, they’ll be more likely to care enough about your tweet to retweet it to their followers.
When they do, make sure to thank them! Gratitude goes a long way to ensuring that you’ll have help from them in the future.
Strategy #2: The Scavenger Hunt!
This slide is really self explanatory, so I’m not going to go through it step by step. If you want good examples, check out ModCloth. They do a scavenger hunt on their site every Thursday. I know about it because of researching Social Media techniques. Not because I followed them as soon as I found out about them or because I sit on their site for hours on end deciding how to spend my paycheck. Really. Also, RavenSEO tools does an amazing job.
The secret behind this is to offer a prize worth having. Take Henne Jewelers for example. They’re about to run a real life scavenger hunt using Social Media and text messaging clues in Pittsburgh next weekend. Their prize? A $15,000 diamond ring. Totally worth the trouble and I’m sure it’s paid for itself in free advertising already.
Strategy#3: The Promotion
Couldn’t be easier. Figure out a promotion that’s worth having, create a promo code and then just syndicate the heck out of it over all platforms. Also, check out the handy list of promo sites. They are sites that basically just list promo codes, and are great for sending tons of short-term targeted traffic to your site.
Secondary Links
Secondary links, for the purposes of this post, are the links that you’d be going after during a traditional link building campaign: High PR trusted sites that will send a lot of targeted traffic your way. Even though garnering these types of links should not be the primary goal of a social media campaign (in my opinion) they are the icing on the cake when they happen. If the content that you’re promoting is viral enough, they will certainly happen. If you’re promoting a product page, it’s less likely, but still possible. You get the picture.
Social Media Tactics to Avoid
Would it be lazy of me to say “Don’t be annoying” and leave it at that? Probably. Seriously, though, anything that annoys you will probably annoy the people that you’re trying to reach out to. Not to mention ruin your social credibility (see item one on that list.)
Hopefully this has been helpful to you. I know it’s been helpful to me to write it all out. If anyone out there wants to share their favorite social media strategy, I’d love to see it!
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Social Media
Posted on May 10, 2010 by Jonathan Weber
If you don’t see them yet, you will over the next couple of weeks as they get rolled out: new AdWords reports in Google Analytics.
What’s so new and great about them?
What’s still there
They’re still under Traffic Sources, which now shows the (rearranged) AdWords section with the new reports. They’re not all new though: the Campaigns report (the mainstay of AdWords reporting) is still around, and so are Keyword Positions (which helps you see the distribution of your ads in various positions on the page) and TV Campaigns (for use with AdWords TV ads).
What’s old is new
The layout of those reports is basically the same (the Site Usage, Goal Sets, Ecommerce, and Clicks tabs are still there). But hidden in the dimension drop-down menus, you’ll find a variety of new options.
- Ad Distribution Network — did the ad appear on Google Search, Search Partners, or the Content Network?
- Match Type — was it a broad, phrase, or exact match keyword?
- Matched Search Query — what was the actual search query the user entered that triggered the ad?
- Placement Domain and URL — for Content Network ads, what sites/pages did they appear on?
- Ad Format — text or display ads
- Targeting Type — keyword or placement
- Display and Destination URLs
“Matched Search Query” alone is worth a pile of gold. No more kludges to figure out the search terms your broad match keywords matched! Now it’s easy as pie to find potential negative keywords and untapped potential for related keywords and phrases.
With “Placement Domain” and “Placement URL”, we now also have much better data right within Google Analytics about Content Network ads and where they are shown.
Shiny and new
There are also a variety of brand-new reports. First of all, there’s an Overview report for the AdWords section which gives a nice summary.
The Keywords and Placements reports simply show all the keywords and placements across all your campaigns, which is handy.
Day Parts gives you data about your ads by day of the week or hour of the day. This is useful to see if you want to pause your ads during certain times when they don’t perform as well as you’d like.
And finally, the Destination URLs report is a great way to see if certain landing pages work better than others. Think of it as the “Top Landing Pages” report but just for your AdWords ads. It’s easy to see which destination URLs lead to more conversions or lower bounce rates.
So, that’s it. The changes are simple, but there’s a lot of power there with the new options. Take a look… If you don’t see these reports, you will soon — access is being rolled out to all accounts over the next few weeks.
View Comments (3 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics, Paid Search
Posted on May 5, 2010 by Robbin Steif
Earlier this week, I got what I perceived to be the strangest survey from Intuit. The survey was about their online backup service.
They asked me questions like, “Please rank which of these four features factor into your use of our backup service.” And then they named all these strange services that I didn’t even know they had, like disaster recovery, or fixing things up once your employee messes up your accounting data.
Finally, I wrote, “I use your service because my jump drives always broke or got too full.” Simple. Easy.
The problem we (like Intuit) often have is that we have super duper services and special features, and we think that our customers care about them, when in fact, our customers might not even know about them. (After all, we spent a year and a lot of money on that Super Duper feature, and now we want to write about it on our websites, no?)
All of which gets down to why qualitative data — surveys and user testing — are so important as we learn to create better websites.
Robbin
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Surveys, Writing for the web
Posted on May 3, 2010 by Robbin Steif
We are going to be unveiling our new and improved Google Analytics Training in NYC, June 8-10.
Here is the problem that trainers have when they teach about any technical topic — different attendees are at different levels. We used to get this feedback in the evaluation forms all the time. Some attendees would write, “Over my head,” and others would write, “Too basic.” Then we started to segment the first day (marketing/analysis) by user level, and our ratings went sky high. (See, when they tell you that segmentation is the heart of web analytics, they don’t just mean the tool you are using….)
In NYC, we’ll be having three days of training: Google Analytics 101, 201 and 301. The first day is for beginning marketers (or those analysts who have never worked with GA before.) The second day is for advanced analysts. We get questions related to this problem all the time, “How do I take my analysis to a new level?” And the third day is for techies.
It’s $499/day, with a $50 discount when the same individual attends two days (and $100 off for three days of attendance by the same individual), with lots of Google goodies, lunch, etc.
Click here to learn more or to register.
Robbin
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Google Analytics, Industry News
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