Posted on July 19, 2010 by Christina Keffer
Or doesn’t care.
Hi! I’m Christina. I’m an SEO. It’s what I do full-time for a living. You know why? Because it takes one person (me) at least 40 hours a week to do all that’s necessary for 5 or so clients. It’s all I can do to keep up with the daily demands on my time and makes sure I am doing all that’s necessary on-page and off-page to make sure my clients rank higher and get the kind of quality traffic in quantities that I have told them are possible.
My BF (best friend, or boyfriend? OR BOTH? You decide!) is a web developer. Full time. 40 hours a week (at least) of taking assets from a PR firm and converting them into working awesome websites that are perfect regardless of which browser you’re looking at.
Yet another friend of mine is a graphic designer. He spends about 60 hours a week (he’s insane) taking the vague, nebulous “I kinda like bricks. Can you create for me a background that’s sorta brick-like, but not TOO brick-like.” requests from crazy people and codifying that nonsense into awesome well thought-out, engaging designs for websites. AND he now leaves room for blocks of text in his designs ’cause I threatened his life if he didn’t.
So when some web designer comes along and says “I Build Search Engine Friendly Web Sites And Specialize in Usability and Graphic Design,” I say “You and what army, buddy?!” Because, honestly, each one of those separate elements is one person’s full time job.
The most egregious cross-crafting claims seem to come from web development/design firms. I’ve seen a rash of it lately, and it’s ticking me off, so I’m going to embark on the web-designer-disparaging rant that every SEO seems to indulge in at least once in their career.
If you’re a small business owner or indeed anyone shopping around for web designers/developers, this post is for you, so listen up. If you wouldn’t ask the following questions, listen way harder, ’cause you totally should.
Sign #1 That Your Web Designer Knows Bubkus About SEO:
During the web designers sales pitch, you say “I’m concerned about the Search Engines’ ability to access and properly index my site. Consequently, I’d like to know what kind of code you’ll be using to render the major design elements of my site.” and they answer:
a. Flash
b. Javascript
c. It doesn’t matter
d. I am be coding very well, it’s ok.
No! No! Bad web developer! Bad! Search engines are crappy at indexing stuff in Flash videos, they don’t execute Javascript and it TOTALLY matters that you use correct HTML and CSS to create major design elements!
How would it be if you launched your site, only to discover it can’t get indexed because the HTML navigation was triggered by JAVASCRIPT and couldn’t be accessed by the search engines. Really crappy, as one unfortunate client of mine recently realized.
Sign #2 That Your Web Designer Knows More About the Flight Patterns of African Swallows than SEO
After the first answer, you start thinking, damn I better quiz this guy a bit more. After all I can stipulate how I want my code written, right? Maybe they’ll still prove acceptable. So, you ask “What would you recommend for home page content?” and they smile knowingly and say:
a. A splash page that asks the user whether or not they want the Flash version of the site or the HTML version
b. A splash page that is a one-time intro and that is bypassed after it has planted a cookie in the user’s browser
c. A copy-less page with huge, high-def pictures of your products that play on an embedded flash player, and one link to the “contact” page.
d. I am making you very good a home page with many links and picture movies.
Swing and a miss you naughty developer you. Splash pages are an SEO nightmare. Doubly so when they lead to two different versions of the site. Forget the duplicate content issues, think of total void of index-able copy that most of these types of pages suffer from. Also, Search Engines don’t download cookies, so in the case of suggestion B, the SE will never get past your crappy splash page or index any internal pages on the site. If the SEs have nothing to index, THEY WON’T INDEX ANYTHING!
Sign #3 That Your Web Designer Wouldn’t Know Good SEO if it Jumped Up and Bit Them on the…Face.
By now, you should be running far, far away. If the dude or dudette who told you they do web design AND SEO has given you any of the previously mentioned answers, for the love of little green apples, find someone who can do better. However, if you feel like torturing yourself or just getting a good laugh, ask them the following question: “What’s the difference between a 301 redirect and a 302 redirect?” You’ll likely get the following answers:
a. Nothing. They accomplish the exact same task: taking the user from a defunct page and sending them to another.
b. Did some crappy SEO set me up?
c. Ever heard of a meta refresh redirect? Duh, everyone’s using them now.
d. I am seeing no need to worry about redirecting. We’ll take care of it.
Wrong, wrong, wrong and ugh. Firstly, although the user experience is the same for both kinds of redirects, only one passes on the SEO benefit of any inbound links: the 301 redirect. Secondly, Yes, I, the SEO, totally set them up to protect themselves against frauds who claim they know SEO. Thirdly, the world wide web consortium has completely deprecated the use of the meta refresh tag and suggests using javascript in the VERY VERY rare event that you’d ever need a page to refresh automatically and often. The refresh redirect is of the most abused forms of redirect out there right now.
And fourthly, and perhaps most importantly, don’t ever let someone tell you redirects are unimportant especially if you’re switching over a site that ranks great to a new design with different URLS. It will totally, totally screw you over.
Sign #4 That Your Web Designer Knows Less about SEO than my 95 Year Old Grandma
The question “What will the URLs look like?” is answered any of the following ways:
a. It depends on how the user got to the page. There is a bunch of parameter stuff and you don’t need to worry about it.
b. They’re dynamically generated. The search engines won’t care. Lots of sites have dynamically generated URLs.
c. Look at this cool session id…
FYI, all of you out there in search of SEO knowledgeable web designers who are about to get seriously messed up by bad URLs, it is almost always to provide the static-appearing, keyword rich URLs that the search engines prefer. There is no good reason for a session id anymore- that’s done with cookies these days, and search engines do care a lot about how clean the URL is. It should also have keywords in it. So there. 
The 5th and Most Irritating Sign That An Untrained Monkey Knows More about SEO Than Your Web Designer
If, when you start querying your designer about SEO concerns, they condescendingly shake their heads and say any of the following, stand up and equally condescendingly slam the door on your way out of their office: 
a. SEO can be done effectively after the design process is completed, so don’t worry yourself about it now.
b. SEO is easy. We do it all the time. Don’t worry about it.
c. SEO is as complicated as web design and I don’t’ think you’ll understand what we do even if I explain it to you.
d. I guarantee you that if we do your design, you’ll rank #1. Cross my heart and hope to die.
If I ate a carrot every time I heard answer #1, I’d be able to see in the dark. You have to take SEO into consideration from the very beginning of the web design process. You’ll get the most bang for your buck later if the foundations of the Site are SEO friendly.
SEO is not easy. I swear to god, it’s not. It’s hard, it takes oodles of time and it’s constantly changing so even if your web designer knew what he was doing 5 years ago, it doesn’t matter because it’s probably wrong now. SEO, however, is not rocket science, or even molecular biology. You can understand the fundamentals at least enough to make an educated decision as to who to have design your site. And lastly, if anyone claims that they can guarantee rankings, they’re simply full of it. Period.
Disclaimer that will keep me from being flamed by Web Designers (hopefully)
Now that I’m done with my tirade, let me give some caveats that should do at least a bit to put out some enraged fires:
1. I don’t actually think that web designers have to know anything about SEO. That’s what SEOs are for. However, I do take issue when someone CLAIMS to know SEO and marginalizes an entire industry into an add-on to a web design package and then screws it up.
2. There are a lot and I mean a LOT of web designers who can answer all these questions flawlessly. These individuals who somehow balance their knowledge of design with their knowledge of the requirements of the search engines are priceless and awesome and you should hire them when you find them.
3. There are even more web designers and web design firms who know they don’t know and partner with SEO firms to make sure their finished product is awesome and SE friendly. This is commendable. If I were a business owner looking for a web design firm, I would choose this kind of setup.
So don’t flame me, mkay?
View Comments (39 Responses) | Categories: Search Engine Optimization
Posted on July 15, 2010 by John
Sometimes when presenting a report to someone else, you may want to display a list of pages as Page Titles instead of URLs. But you still want to filter the list to show only certain pages. And you want to filter the list to only show certain pages based on the URL.
In the screenshot below, I am displaying a report by URL and as the
Secondary Dimension I have selected Page Title. The filter at the bottom of the report works on the First Column and I have filtered the report to a particular subdirectory.
So far this looks pretty straight forward, right?
THE CATCH:
The catch is, in GA, there is no option to select Page Title as a Secondary Dimension in the URL report.
This means that if you want to display the pages by Page Title for only a sub-directory, you’d have to come up with a very convoluted filter to filter in every page title in that subdirectory and at the same time remove unwanted positive matches from other sub-directories.
So how did I get URL and Page Title to show up in the same report?
The trick is in using a URL parameter called “segkey” which you add to the URL in the address bar for the report. For reference, I’ve included the report URL below (Note that I xxx’d out the ID for the profile):
https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/top_content?id=xxxxxx&pdr=20100515-20100614&cmp=average&trows=10&gdfmt=nth_day&rpt=TopContentReport&segkey=request_uri|page_title&tab=0&tchcol=0&tst=0&tscol=v0&tsdir=0&mdet=WORLD&midx=0&gidx=0&glcnt=1#lts=1276612598642
Step 1: Generate your Top Content Report
Step 2: Copy and Paste &segkey=request_uri|page_title into the url in the query parameter section of the URL (amidst the other & parameters)
Step 3: Press enter and enjoy your report.
There are a couple of reasons, from an SEO perspective, that you may want to show both the page URI and page title together.
1. Find duplicate title tags – If you’re looking at a specific section of your site, like in the example above, you can quickly see how targeted your title tags are. You might even find duplicate title tags. In the example above, you can see we have two pages with the same title tag – #4 and #8. Each page on your site should have a different title tag, and this gives you the opportunity to be more specific and target more long-tail search terms.
2. Monitor & Measure – If you’ve changed the title tag on a page, you can filter to contain just the URI for that page, then show a month before and a month after the change to see if traffic to that page has increased or decreased.
Thanks to
Jim for the “Other reasons to do this” section, and thanks to
Christina for helping me to rewrite parts of the post.
View Comments (4 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics, Web Analytics
Posted on July 12, 2010 by Robbin
Just a quick note to tell you that we’ll be doing Google Analytics Seminars for Success in four cities during the second half of 2010:
Washington DC: August 10-12
Boston: Sept. 21-23
Chicago: Nov. 2-4
NYC: Dec. 7-9
You can check out all the details on our Google Analytics training page.
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Industry News
Posted on July 7, 2010 by Jim
We’ve talked about tracking local search results and tracking Google Product search results before, so it seems natural to look at how you can also track Google video results. When I say Google video results, I’m referring to the video listings that are included in the main SERPs (search engine results pages), as seen below for a search on Tour de France video:
Why track video results?
If you’re spending time, money, and other precious resources to produce video content, don’t you want to have as much intelligence as possible about how that content is performing? In the results above, if I click on the bottom result (for the Guardian’s video) and go to their site, my visit will show in their analytics as coming from Google/organic, with no indication that it was a video result that got my attention and compelled me to click.
Knowing how much traffic you are getting to your video content from these video results (and segmenting to see if this traffic is valuable) can help you make a number of decisions. Maybe you’ll find out that a lot of your organic search traffic is actually from video results right when management is getting ready to cut the video budget (whew, crisis averted!). Or perhaps you segment this group of visitors to find out when they watch. Are you posting new videos when your audience is actively seeking them out?
How to track video results
It should be noted that this will only work if you host the videos on your own server. If you use YouTube, you’ll have to stick to their Insights data about your video. If you do host the videos on your own server, then you get a big gold star sticker and can proceed. There are five easy steps to tracking your video results:
- Create a video Sitemap file
- Include vanity URLs
- 301 redirect to URLs with tracking parameters
- Submit video Sitemap
- Monitor the results
1. Create a video Sitemap file
You can either create a video Sitemap file (XML), or add video content to an existing Sitemap based on the Sitemap protocol. The latter is a new development (as of June 29, 2010 – see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/06/sitemaps-one-file-many-content-types.html). Either way, it works just the same. The idea is that you create a XML file that gives the search engines details about your video content, like title, description, play page URL, thumbnail URL, raw video file location and several other optional attributes.
Here’s an example of a video sitemap for a site with just one video:
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/videos/some-video-landing-page</loc>
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/video123.flv</video:content_loc>
<video:player_loc>http://www.example.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123</video:player_loc>
<video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.example.com/thumbs/123.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
<video:title>Grilling steaks for summer</video:title>
<video:description>Alkis shows you how to get perfectly done steaks every time</video:description>
<video:rating>4.2</video:rating>
<video:view_count>12345</video:view_count>
<video:publication_date>2007-11-05T19:20:30+08:00</video:publication_date>
<video:expiration_date>2009-11-05T19:20:30+08:00</video:expiration_date>
<video:tag>steak</video:tag>
<video:tag>meat</video:tag>
<video:tag>summer</video:tag>
<video:category>Grilling</video:category> <video:family_friendly>yes</video:family_friendly>
<video:duration>600</video:duration>
<video:restriction relationship="allow">IE GB US CA</video:restriction>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>
2. Include vanity URLs
In your Sitemap, when you list the page that each video is on, use a vanity URL. For instance, in the example above, the page is listed as http://www.example.com/videos/some-video-landing-page . Change that to something like http://www.example.com/videos/some-video-landing-page/vid
3. 301 redirect to URLs with tracking parameters
Set up 301 redirects from your vanity URLs to the actual video page URLs with campaign tracking parameters appended. To follow the example above, we would 301 redirect
http://www.example.com/videos/some-video-landing-page/vid
to
http://www.example.com/videos/some-video-landing-page/#utm_source=googleVideo&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=videoTitle
Notice the use if the hashtag (#) to set of the parameters instead of the question mark (?). Here’s why you should use the hashtag and how to set it up.
4. Submit video Sitemap
After your video Sitemap has been created and uploaded to your server, and you’ve set up 301 redirects for your vanity URLs, go to your Google Webmaster Tools account and submit your Sitemap.
You can also include the location of your video Sitemap (if different than your main Sitemap) in your robots.txt file. It should look something like this:
User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/vidsitemap.xml
5. Monitor the results
Once you’ve gone through steps 1-4 and given Google enough time to discover your video Sitemap, you can log into your analytics and dig into the details. You should be able to see visits coming from the video results, and compare them to other traffic sources, find out which keywords were used and much more.
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics, Web Analytics
Posted on June 29, 2010 by Jim
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
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: Uncategorized
Posted on June 21, 2010 by Jim
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: Uncategorized
Posted on June 17, 2010 by Robbin
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: Uncategorized
Posted on June 4, 2010 by John
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
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