Archive for June, 2010
Posted on June 29, 2010 by Jim Gianoglio
This is a great question, and it comes to us from Twitter. Although I was able to answer within the allotted 140 characters, I don’t feel like my answer really explored the nuances and possibilities of the question. It did, however, open the opportunity to write about it in more depth here.
The original tweet from @levelanalytics:
ugh, Losing it. Where in Google #Analytics do I find Goal Conversions by Landing Page. #mondayfail
My reply:
Custom reports would be good for that
@levelanalytics reply:
Yup. I was brain cramped. Advanced Segments do it as well.
As the saying goes, there’s more than one way to skin a cat (what an awful saying!). The same is true in Google Analytics – often there is more than one way to get the data you’re looking for. However with GA, depending on how you get to the data, you may or may not have access to other related bits of information. For example, if you use Advanced Segments to find your data, you can kiss your Secondary Dimensions good bye.
So, if you’re looking for goal conversions by landing page, which method should you use – Custom Reports or Advanced Segments?
Method 1: Custom Reports
Custom Reports are great in this case if you want to know specifics – like goal starts, completions, abandonment rates, conversion rates and values. For example, I could look at the visitors who landed on a specific product page and see how many made a purchase, or how many abandoned shopping carts there were.
To do this, you simply go into your Custom Reports tab and create a new custom report. Set your dimension to Landing Page and your metrics to whichever goal-related data you want (don’t forget to include Pageviews for context!).
Click to enlarge
Once you have this set up, you can go to that custom report and dig even deeper by filtering the landing page (to look only at a specific page or group of pages) and set your secondary dimension to something meaningful to you, perhaps Source or Visitor Type. Then you’ll see a nice portrait of your landing page with goal-related data, like below:
Click to enlarge
Method 2: Advanced Segments
This is the quick and easy way to find out goal conversions if you already have a specific landing page (or section of pages) in mind. The nice thing about using Advanced Segments is that you can look at visits that have a specific landing page across all your reports (visitor information, traffic sources, content, etc.). With Custom Reports, you’re locked in to the dimensions and metrics you choose.
The downside is that Advanced Segments are disabled when you use pivot charts and secondary dimensions in your reports.
Setting up the Advanced Segment for this is pretty simple – just click on Create a new advanced segment in the Advanced Segments dropdown. For the dimension or metric, choose Landing Page. From there, you can choose Matches exactly and specify a single landing page that you’re interested in, or you could choose Contains and include the directory for the section of pages that interest you.
Click to enlarge
For example, in the screen shot above, I created an advanced segment to look at visits that landed on John’s post on segmenting your goal funnel to see how many of those visits resulted in new blog subscriptions. After taking 60 seconds to set up that advanced segment, I can now go into the goals report and get a quick glimpse of the goal conversion for that landing page:
Click to enlarge
Of course, I could also look at the traffic sources, time on site, visitor type, other pages viewed and more using this advanced segment.
There you go – two ways to skin a cat GA. Do you know of any other ways – let me know in the comments!
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics, Web Analytics
Posted on June 24, 2010 by John Henson
In the right sidebar of our blog is a form that can be used to submit questions.
Mostly it is just used to spam us, but we do occasionally get a legitimate question or two:
Question 1 concerned exporting more rows. The official GA blog posted an article on this topic not long ago. The trick is to use a query parameter in the URL:
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/08/back-to-basics-tip-for-exporting-rows.html
Question 2 was about image files showing up in Top Content reports when they shouldn’t.
Normally an image file would not appear at all in your Top Content reports, unless you add special implementation. I’m not sure how to answer this question without actually looking at the case in question, but one thing you might check, if you feel the item in question is no longer on your site is to create an Advanced Segment for visits that include that item. Then check the hostnames report and see if the visits are occurring on your domain. It might be that the views for that item is being sent to GA from a cached or copied version of an old page on another domain.
Question 3 involved configuration of automatic emails in GA.
Above the graph in most reports is a grey bar. On the left hand side of the bar is a button that is labeled “email”. Go to the report you wish to email and click that button. After clicking on that button you are taken to a screen where emails can be set up. Click on the tab that is labeled “Schedule” and select the recipients, the delivery schedule, etc. When the options are set up as you prefer, click the “schedule” button at the bottom of the form.
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics
Posted on June 21, 2010 by Jim Gianoglio
Our Pittsburgh SEO Training Workshop is in less than two days, and seats are filling up quickly. So if you’ve been on the fence about whether or not to come, let me sweeten the pot a little. Raven Internet Marketing Tools has given us a one-year Pro-level membership ($1,188 value!) to give away to one lucky attendee. Shouldn’t that be you?
Raven’s suite of tools make it easy for you to manage your SEO and social media efforts, research and track keywords and competitors and create custom reports. They save you time by integrating all the tools you need in one place, so you can focus on what matters.
We’ll also be giving away a fantastic book “Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment” by Jim Sterne, along with various other pieces of swag. But that’s not why you should attend this workshop. You should come because you want to learn more about SEO and how to increase traffic to your website. You should come because you want to be surrounded by other smart people in the same position as you. You should come because you can ask the experts your questions and get one-on-one face time with us.
Whatever your reasons are for coming, we promise you’ll walk away with some actionable advice (otherwise, the training’s on us). If you want to find out more, check out the scheduled sessions, or you can register here.
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Search Engine Optimization
Posted on June 17, 2010 by Robbin Steif
Last fall, Google Analytics announced, and gradually rolled out, a much-needed feature, annotations. Annotations allow you to create personalized notes in your analytics. Now, no more wracking your brain for (or reanalyzing) that incredible peak in traffic last August or that dip in your goal conversions the month before. Instead, you merely write a note in your analytics when something unusual happens. Examples: “New Site Launched.” “Fall AdWords campaign began.” “New blogpost retweeted and retweeted.”
How do I create an annotation?
There are two ways to put notes onto your GA interface. The first is to “pull down” the annotations alternative, which you can see right below the graph at the top of your GA screen – it looks like a little handle with a tiny grey arrow on it. The red arrow points to the pull-down in the screen shot below.
You only have to click on the “Create new annotation” link to get started at the bottom right of that screen.
You can also create an annotation from the graph at the top of the GA screen. You can see the number of visits on Wed, March 17 in the screen shot below and right under that, an opportunity to create a new annotation.
What can I do with an annotation?
Once you start to create an annotation, you’ll have the ability to write it (160 spaces and characters), star it if you like (so that you can pull up only your starred annotations down the road), and choose either “shared” or “private.” That last choice is important – anyone who has access to the profile where you created the annotation will see it if you choose “shared.” Only your sign in will have access if you choose “private.” No matter whether you choose to share or not, the annotation creator is the only person who can edit it.
What good are annotations, really?
Annotations can be used to get the whole organization on board. Here you can see a screen shot of a company has just started to use annotations to let the rest of the company know what Marketing is doing. They even went back and added old annotations so that other departments could learn what Marketing has been doing in the past.
We love annotations because not everyone at the company always thinks to tell their consultants what they are doing. When a client runs any kind of advertising, it helps if they use annotations. That way, we don’t waste time trying to figure out the cause of a sudden surge of traffic. Or vice versa – if they one day decide to stop running AdWords or display ads, annotations keep us from panicking about the sudden “loss” of traffic. You’ll love them, too, because you’ll have a history for *yourself* of why those things happened.
Some best practices in annotations
Outside of special events that come your way, you should consider using annotations when you:
- Start a new profile.
- Make major technical changes to your website (e.g. add events that change your bounce rate calculation)
- Make major design changes to your website
- Start important marketing initiatives
- Rearrange goals and/or filters
Robbin
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics
Posted on June 15, 2010 by Christina Keffer
Otherwise known as How to Get Your Own Website Ranking!
Have you ever been to one of those seminars that throw a lot of theory at you but no actual usable information? So have we, and we’re tired of them.
We’re doing something different: We’ve created an SEO Workshop where everyone will actually get down in the trenches and find out how to do things like keyword research, on-page optimization and link building.
The Course Schedule is intensive, but we’ve tailored the classes to be accessible to a wide variety of skill levels. Both experienced webmasters and less tech savvy business owners will get insightful, actionable information that they can take home and apply to websites right after the SEO training workshop is over.
Example Tip:
Find out who is linking to your competitors. Go to Yahoo.com and type Link:www.competitor’s-URL.com into the search bar.
We’ll show you what tools to use, where to use them, how to get links, and so forth. So bring your sharpened pencil and notebook … er, laptop. You’re going to need it.
Click for more information about the Pittsburgh SEO Training Workshop. Hope to see you there!
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Search Engine Optimization
Posted on June 4, 2010 by John Henson
What is a Funnel?
Your goal funnel is the set of required pages leading up to your final goal, such as a purchase. You may be familiar with the Funnel Visualization report in Google Analytics (GA). It shows you how many visitors go to each step and how many leave the funnel at that step. You can spot trouble points with your funnel and take steps to correct the issue. Here’s what the report looks like:
The Problem:
While you can segment goal metrics such as goal completions, starts and values in GA, you can’t segment the Funnel Visualization report. You can’t see how different types of visitors may leave the funnel at different steps. For example, you may just want to see where new visitors abandon your goal funnel, compared to returning visitors. When you look up at Advanced Segments in the top right of the Funnel Visualization report, here’s what you see:
The Horizontal, Segmentable Funnel
I want to show you a method that will allow you to see your goal conversion funnels in any report, segmented however you want. I’m going to name it the “Horizontal Funnel” since we’ll be viewing it left to right, instead of top to bottom.
Let’s start with what you’ll get, using this method.
The traditional GA Goal Funnel report shows
- Number of visits to each step in the funnel
- The percentage of visits that continued to the next step
- Where exiting visits went.
With the Horizontal Funnel method you’ll see
- Number of visits to each step in the funnel.
- The percentage of visits that did not continue to the next step
You don’t get to see where exiting visitors went. . .but you WILL be able to:
- Apply Advanced Segments
- See the funnel for multiple segments in the same report
Let’s look at an example of what a traditional e-commerce funnel that looks like:
Shopping Cart –> Address Info –> Payment Info –> Review Order –> Thank You
In the image below, the values outlined in blue are the visits to each step, and the values outlined in orange are the exit rate between steps.
It’s like a regular funnel, just flipped on it’s side, using goals, first steps in funnels, and custom reports – more detail below. As you can see, this is in a keyword report. So, the funnel can be seen in-line in the report, for whatever segments you want; in this case for individual keyword phrases. And you can apply Advanced Segments or Secondary Dimensions to the report.
That’s the “what”. Now for the “how”.
1. Create the Goals
For each step in the funnel, we create a separate goal in GA. This provides the values in blue: how many visits touched each step. Now we want to be able to get the values in orange, the exit rate between steps. In each of the goals following the first step in the conversion process, we create a funnel. Each funnel contains a single step which is the Goal URL for the preceding goal. That’s the key. The preceding goal becomes the Funnel Step 1 URL for the next goal.
2. Create the custom report
Now that the goals are set up we can create the custom report we need to view the data. To set up the report we are going to use two different metrics, Goal Completions and Abandonment Rate.
The Goal Completion metric is the number of visits in which a particular Goal URL was visited at least once.
The Abandonment Rate metric is the percentage of visits that started the funnel (saw Step 1), but did not complete the goal.
In our Goal #17, we made the Funnel Step 1 = Goal #16 Completion. So, Goal #17 Abandonment Rate = percentage of visits that saw Goal#16 but did not complete Goal #17 = Exit Rate between the 2 goals. In this example the first step in the funnel is in Goal Slot #16, so Goal 16 Completions goes first. The second step was in Goal Slot #17, so we place Goal 17 Abandonment Ratenext, followed by Goal 17 Completions.
Then Goal 18 Abandonment Rate, followed by Goal 18 Completions.
And so on.
After you have all the goals in place in the Metrics section of the report, it’s time to move on to the Dimensions. In this case, we chose to dimension by Keyword. But you may wish to see your goal funnel report by City, State, Browser, Landing Page, or whatever is most appropriate for your situation.
That’s it. Happy Funnel Segmentation.
Small Update:
As Ophir Prusak helpfully pointed out in the comments section, it would be a good idea to note that the values you get using this method may be a little different from what the Funnel Visualization report shows.
One of the reasons for this is that the Funnel Visualization report makes the assumption that If a visit includes Step 3, for example, then it MUST include Step 2 and Step 1.
So if an actual visit sees Step 3, But DOESN’T see Step 2 or Step 1 — what does GA do? It adds a count to Step 1 and Step 2 ANYWAY.
This Horizontal Funnel method does not do this. So if you have a funnel with entrances into the middle of the funnel, numbers may be different.
There are probably other good reasons why they could be different as well, but that is the most obvious one and definately needed to be pointed out.
Thanks Ophir!
For more about tricksy funnel issues in GA try checking out this post on our blog:
http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2008/06/25/funnel-problems-google-analytics/
-John
View Comments (29 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics
Posted on June 3, 2010 by Jim Gianoglio
What does this post have to do with pictures of Batman? Nothing, actually. Other than the fact that we’ll start getting some search traffic from people looking for images of Gotham City’s caped crusader.
What this post is really about is the importance of how you title your blog posts. When I say “title” there are two key elements that I’m referring to: 1) the headline on the page and 2) the title tag (which is often the same as the headline).
Why Batman? Well, he’s the inspiration for this post. You see, way back in 2007 we wrote this post with a few pictures from the eMetrics Summit. It was just a quick, lighthearted post that started out with a reference to Batman. The headline on the page is Batman rules: Pictures from the Summit, and the title tag includes that same headline at the beginning.
To date, we’ve had more than 700 visits from people searching for Batman pictures (there are 57 different keyword variations, everything from batman pictures to pics of batman and even batman in love pics!) In fact, the keyword phrase “batman pictures” is on the top 10 list of keywords that have driven the most visits to our site of all time. It’s #9. I don’t know if that should make me happy, or sad.
What’s the moral of this story? Title your posts carefully! Remember that the title tag/headline of you blog post is one of the most important SEO elements that you have control over. Although it can be tempting to write clever or funny headlines, don’t disregard the impact that they have on bringing in qualified (or in this case unqualified) search traffic.
I’ll leave you with two more humorous examples:
Our post titled So you think you know what your customers love? gets visits from people searching for how do you know when your in love.
Our post titled GA Site Overlay (and a letter to you, Avinash) was visited by someone searching for a letter to you my lover.
Do you have some funny examples of keywords that you get visits from? Share them in the comments!
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Writing for the web
Posted on June 1, 2010 by John Henson
It sometimes happens that someone will accidentally use your GA Web Property ID (UA-xxxxx-y) in their website.
When this happens, pageviews and visits from their website will show up in your GA reports.
To prevent this, you can create a filter and apply it to your main profiles.
The screenshot shows the use of a Custom -> Include filter on the Hostname field. This example is for the site cats.com.
We are only including pageviews that happen on a domain that matches the regular expression “cats.com”. This will match all of your subdomains such as my.cats.com or pictures.cats.com.
Website spanning multiple domains:
If you have a website that spans multiple domains such as cats.com and mycats.com and bluecats.com, then instead of filtering on “cats.com” you simply list all your domains, separated by a pipe:
Instead of:
cats.com
use:
cats.com|mycats.com|bluecats.com
Note:
If you have a profile that doesn’t have any filters on it, for raw data and troubleshooting, make sure you don’t add this filter to that profile.
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Filters, Google Analytics
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