Google Analytics Goals, Funnels, and Filters

            My experience with Google Analytics for my blog this week was like night and day compared to the drama of last week! Lucky for me, no additional coding efforts were needed! Phew! I have learned that understanding HTML, and even just copying and pasting it into the right place, is not my strong point. I became a bit fanatical with my Google Analytics account this week, wanting to check the data every day. After watching what seems to be all the videos offered on the Google Analytics website (if you have not had a chance to do so, click here. Great resources!), I felt very confident about toggling around the tool and experimenting with different analyses. I was excited to log in each day and see the fresh new data cumulated giving me insights into the visits and visitors to my blog. Watching the Google Analytics videos made me excited to drive more traffic to my site so that I could experiment with all the different aspects available through Google Analytics. This week, my primary focus for the blog was exploring the benefits and capabilities through Google Analytics relating to goals, funnels, and filters.

Entering into this week, my perception of setting a Goal in Google Analytics was simply saying something along the lines of “See a 10% increase in traffic to my blog this week”. This week opened my eyes to the variety of different types of goals that can be set up in the Google Analytics tool. Google Analytics defines goals as measuring the level of interactivity on a website, and our lesson this week defined it further by stating “a goal is a web site page that helps generate conversions for your site”. (P.I. Reed School of Journalism, 2012) Any company with a web presence should have goals for their websites, if only to answer the question of “What is the purpose of my website?” Google Analytics can help companies monitor the success of these goals, report on them, and help you improve on them.

According to our lesson this week, there are four types of Goals – URL destination, visit duration, pages/visit, and event. (P.I. Reed School of Journalism, 2012) URL destination goals let you specify a specific page as the goal page, and as a user reaches that page the goal is achieved. An example of this would be the order confirmation or receipt page and ordering online or completing a form on a website. Visit duration goals allow you to set a specific time allowance that you want a user to engage with your site, and the goal is achieved once a user meets or exceeds this specified time. For this blog, I would set a goal of at least 120 seconds per visit. Since my blog is very basic, keeping the time minimal but not too short would allow me to capture a snapshot of which visitors are at least scanning through my most recent blog post, if not completely reading through the whole blog. Obviously, more developed sites could extend this time based on their research on engagement levels. I can see this being extremely beneficial for ecommerce sites to develop statements such as “users that exceed 5 minutes on the website have a 35% higher propensity to complete a transaction”. The pages per visit goal is achieved once a user visits a defined number of pages on the website in one visit. This helps give insight on how engaged a user was with the content on your site, and if any content optimizations are working. Since my blog is essentially one large feed (page), this was not a goal that I explored in depth, but this could be very useful to companies with much more robust websites than a single page like mine. The final goal is the event goal, which is achieved when a user completed the necessary steps on an event on your website. These events need to be predefined in a special section in Google Analytics before being able to set this up as a goal for your website.

Each goal set up in Google Analytics also has a funnel, which is the path of pages you expect visitors to take on their way to reaching the predefined goal. (P.I. Reed School of Journalism, 2012) Defining these pages allows a company to see how frequently their visitors abandon their path to reaching that goal, and where they go once they stray from that path. (P.I. Reed School of Journalism, 2012) The example provided in our lesson this week related to ecommerce sites, which I think is the most applicable application of funnels. For example, the funnel on an ecommerce site could include the shopping cart page, the shipping information page, and the credit card information page. Using the Funnel Visualization report, a company could see at which point visitors are abandoning the check out process and where they are going once they abandon.  In relation to my blog for this class, this seemed a little too complex for such a one-dimensional layout, but would be very beneficial for ecommerce sites or sites that have more pages and opportunities for more engagement.

The last part of the Google Analytics experiment this week was to use filters with the data produced about my blog within the GA tool. Filters are a way for you to control what data is included in a Google Analytics report you pull, and how you want that data to be presented. There are predefined filters and custom filters available within Google Analytics, and the most helpful I found this week included the ‘Traffic from an IP address’ filter, which allows you to include or exclude specific IP addresses on the reporting. Once identifying my IP address, I could go into my Google Analytics account and exclude myself from data tracking since I visit my blog often and do not want my own visits to skew any data I am receiving on other visitors to my site. One thing I did learn was that applying this kind of filter only applies on data moving forward, and cannot be used on data already recoded. (James, 2008) It will be interesting to watch my data in the coming weeks now that this has been implemented to see how much my personal visits to my blog was contributing to my statistics. Stay tuned for those updates! This particular filter can be extremely helpful in instances like an agency environment that I work in. Whenever we launch a microsite program for a client, we always receive workplace emails asking us to test out the site, fill out forms, click on everything possible, etc. to make sure things are working. Obviously, we would not want to include these thousands of visits in our reporting to the client, so by blocking our work IP addresses, we can test the site without skewing the actual reporting data.

                  The more I dig in to Google Analytics, I am continuously surprised at the amount of capabilities it has – for free! There are so many beneficial features to help companies get the most out of this tool and really help with online practices and optimizations, but it is important that businesses experiment with the tool and spend the time to educate employees (or hire knowledgeable employees) so that the tool can be used for the maximum benefit to the company.

References:

James, K. (2008, September 15). 7 Google Analytics filters to help understand your visitors. Retrieved July 1, 2012, from http://doteduguru.com/id629-google-analytics-filters.html

P.I. Reed School of Journalism, WVU. (2012). Lesson 6: Successful approaches in Google Analytics. Retrieved June 24, 2012, from WVU eCampus website https://ecampus.wvu.edu

RAN. (2009, March 4). 10 must track Google Analytics goals. Web Analytics World. Retrieved June 29, 2012, from http://www.webanalyticsworld.net/2009/03/10-must-track-google-analytics-goals.html

Sparks, D. (2010, March 14). Google Analytics in depth: Goals and funnels. Retrieved July 1, 2012, from http://sixrevisions.com/tools/google-analytics-in-depth-goals-and-funnels/

Valuable Google Analytics Measurements

Google Analytics is an incredible tool that helps track web metrics for websites. One of the best features is that it is free, which allows small and large companies alike to utilize the same types of measurements. This tool can be a goldmine for a company, given that the company knows what their goals are, how to use the tool, and how to analyze the data provided to make informed decisions on their site and brand activity.

For this class, I added a Google Analytics tag to my blog a few weeks ago to begin tracking visitor data and behavior. I will be honest that it was a rough start! I could not get the Google Analytics code to work with the current blog template I had applied, and after rotating between various templates over a two-day period I finally resorted to converting my blog back to the default Blogger template. Getting my tracking up and running was more important than making my blog background look cool! Once I confirmed the code was installed and tracking properly, I began sharing my blog URL with friends and family through Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail with the intention of driving traffic and get data on visitors other than myself. While this blog is definitely in its infancy, I did see a flow of visitors arriving at my site and I was able to start diving into the Google Analytics tool and play around with pulling information.

The first part of the tool data that I began looking through was the Audience Overview section. This section showed me through graphs and summed up data that I had a total of 38 visits to my blog, 18 of which were unique visitors. It is important to know the difference between visits and visitors, since the GA tool measures both. Our lesson this week defines the two very well -“Visits represent the number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site. If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any future activity will be attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be counted as part of the original session. The initial session by a user during any given date range is considered to be an additional visit and an additional visitor. Any future sessions from the same user during the selected time period are counted as additional visits, but not as additional visitors.” (P.I. Reed School of Journalism, 2012) The number of pages per visit was about 3.33, which I think is pretty good considering at the time of the analysis I only had four blog posts total on the blog! The visit duration was around 4:25 (minutes: seconds). Pages per visit and the average visit duration really show a picture that the visitors to my site found the content to be somewhat interesting in order to go through multiple pages or blog posts in a visit, and spend a few minutes reading through the content. Understanding these numbers can help me cater posts in the future to these interest levels, and gauge how the visitors are engaging with the content provided on my blog.

The next few measurements and data points I looked at through June 24, 2012, include demographic information, system information, and mobile information. The demographic information allows me to see the language of my visitors (all English), the country that my visitors are visiting from (all the United States), and even down to the city level (friends and family from the Dallas, TX area and San Francisco, CA area).  As detailed information that I can receive about who my visitors are, and where they come from, can help me better target them and others like them to drive more traffic to my blog. Under the System area, I am able to view the browsers that visitors used to access my blog (Safari 63%, Chrome 27%, and Firefox 9%), as well as the operating system (primarily iOS), and even the service provider (Verizon primarily)! The ability to be able to track down to the service provider of the internet used to browse my blog really made this tool unique to me. Something about that statistic, how specific it can get, really made me realize the potential this tool has to really provide detailed information about visitors. The mobile information provided allowed me to view the operating system, service provider and screen resolution of the mobile devices visitors used to view my blog. This information can definitely take optimizations of a blog to the next level. Since so much of social media is being consumed through mobile devices rather than web browsers, it is critical that a blog or company website be viewable and user friendly for mobile browsing. Knowing the type of devices being used to access the site, as well as the top screen resolutions could allow for prioritization of optimizing the mobile web design to these sizes and devices.

The last few analytics I took a deep look at were regarding the sources of the visits to my blog. These cold be viewed all together, or separated by direct traffic or referral traffic only. Much of my traffic was direct, meaning the friends and family members that I emailed my blog link to, or text the link to, directly entered the URL into their browser to access my blog. However, there were referrals from the Facebook link  I posted on my personal Facebook page, letting me know that some of the traffic to the blog was generated from that communication. This referral report also let me know that I received absolutely no traffic from Twitter, even though I tweeted my blog link and an invitation to view my blog to my followers and friends. This clearly is showing me that while I am pushing messages out to hundreds of people through Twitter, the communication is not working to drive the traffic necessary. So, I should either revise my communication strategy through that channel, or put more weight into other referral channels that are performing better.

What I chose to review from my Google Analytics dashboard was merely the tip of the iceberg of what this tool can really provide. If I had AdWords set up, and search campaigns going, this tool could provide an even deeper look at what these visitors find relevant and worthy of clicks to my blog. While I will not be launching a full blown campaign to promote my blog, I am excited to continue tweeting, emailing, and posting links on Facebook to continue to drive traffic to my blog and allow me to experience the different analyses available through the Google Analytics tool.

References:

Clotti, G. (n.d.). Top 5 Google Analytics reports for bloggers. DailyBlogTips. Retrieved June 24, 2012, from http://www.dailyblogtips.com/top-5-google-analytics-reports-for-bloggers/

Kaushik, A. (2010, December 6). 3 awesome, downloadable, custom web analytics reports. Occam’s Razor. Retrieved June 20, 2012, from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/best-downloadable-custom-web-analytics-reports/

P.I. Reed School of Journalism, WVU. (2012). Lesson 5: Google Analytics. Retrieved June 18, 2012, from the WVU eCampus website: https://ecampus.wvu.edu

Google AdWords and Facebook Advertising

      

            For the first time in history, online advertising is projected a higher spend than print magazines and newspaper spend in 2012. According to a study by eMarketer, online ad spend is expected to generate $39.5 billion in sales in 2012, an increase of 23.3% from 2011. (Indvik, 2012) With so many companies throwing more dollars into online advertising spend, the space is becoming cluttered and marketers are beginning to look at how to better target their online advertising to consumers that are more likely to respond to ads. So, where should you spend your advertising dollars? Spend money where your target customers are, and more than likely they are using Google and Facebook.

        Google Adwords averages a click through rate of around 2%, which is a substantial statistic compared to average online click-through rate statistics. Brands have seen the success of this platform, and are not afraid to spend millions of dollars on campaigns. For example, AT&T spend more that $8 million on AdWords in the month of June 2010 gearing up for the iPhone 4 launch, with other brands such as The University of Phoenix, Expedia, eBay and Amazon all spending over $5 million a month each. (Learmonth, 2010)

The key to Google Adwords is that the advertising is targeting to people who are already looking for a product or service similar to your company, i.e. “dog groomer in Dallas, TX” pops up a local business.  Since many people’s first inclination is to go to Google and search for things they are looking for, the chance of capturing consumers and changing their behavior is greater while they are in this active search phase of the purchase process. According to Google, 8 out of 10 internet users see AdWords each month. (GoogleBusiness, 2009) These ads require no minimum spend, and the total spend per day can be capped at anything the advertiser wants. Payment is done on a CPC basis, and advertisers bid on the key words they want their ad to show up on during a consumer search. These ads are quickly adaptable and can be changed, turned on or turned off at any time, making them ideal to advertisers. Google also hosts a detailed analytics system that allows advertisers access to their ad performance, making it much easier to analyze and make data driven decisions quicker than other advertising platforms.

While Google AdWords in certainly more popular than online advertising methods, Facebook has entered the online ad space and has unique offerings for advertisers. Facebook ad spend has experiences a 1600% growth over the past year – a number that almost seems unreal! (Eler, 2012) Facebook sets itself apart by allowing advertisers to customize the links in their ads to either outside websites (such as a company home page), or to Facebook features the advertiser owns, such as a group, page, application, or event, and can also include images. The targeting capabilities are extensive. Advertisers can target as broad as 25 countries to as specific as a local city. The ads also pull information based on profile data and IP addresses, and the advertiser can target based on marital status, interests, work or school experience, and even target only specific connections of current consumers engaged with the brand on Facebook. Similar to Google Adwords, advertisers bid based on the targeting parameters set forth, but can bid based on a CPC or CPM basis. The biggest difference between Facebook and Google Adwords is that Facebook will be served as regular display ads within the social platform, and consumers are not actively seeking the information server as they would be using Google. This explains why Facebook ads have a click through rate much lower than Google, at only 0.051%. (Lewis, 2011)

References:

Eler, A. (2012, February 1). Report: Facebook ad spending grew

1600% in 2011. Read Write Web. Retrieved June 7, 2012, from http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/report_facebook_ad_spending_grows_1600.php

Facebooktutorial. (2010, April 5). Facebook tutorials – How to

advertise on Facebook. Retrieved June 8, 2012 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jOBDIql4yc

GoogleBusiness. (2009, June 15). Getting started with Google

AdWords. Retrieved June 8, 2012, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx2L6EGa9DY

Indvik, L. (2012, January 19). Online ad spending to surpass print for

first time in 2012 [study]. Mashable. Retrieved June 10, 2012, from http://mashable.com/2012/01/19/online-advertising-surpasses-print-2012/

Learmonth, M. (2010, September 6). What big brands are spending on

Google. Ad Age. Retrieved June 7, 2012, from http://adage.com/article/digital/big-brands-spending-google/145720/

Lewis, M. (2011, December 28). Google AdWords vs. Facebook

advertising. Netwirds. Retrieved June 8, 2012, from http://www.netwirks.com/google-adwords-vs-facebook-advertising/#.T9avho5gNFI