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Posts Tagged ‘Google Analytics’

You might be new to PPC or perhaps would like a refesher, how many things are different about your campaigns now than 2 years ago? Are you sure you’re staying up with the latest trends? Here’s an excellent resource for those wanting to freshen up on their skills or enter the industry. You may want to stick with the old standby’s – Google, Yahoo and MSN or give ROI’s Revolution a shot.

It’s 2 am you’re asleep, and so is everyone else, so why are you paying as much for your PPC ads? Check out the ad-scheduling tool in analytics to help you pin point when your ads will run, and squeeze the most out of PPC budget. There’s several great reporting tools in Google analytics that help you maximize the performance of you adds.

Yahoo & MSN search alliance will affect PPC accounts. By June 30, 2010 PPC accounts from Canada and the US will be transitioned over. In order to bring about a seamless transition dates can be modified from the initial deadline. The alliance between yahoo and msn’s main sales pitch is that the alliance will bring about a streamlining effect for users. My advice; plan, implement and make sure your clients are affected in a positive manner with this industry move.

In search, optimization starts at the time a user sees your ad, and sometimes it doesn’t end until months after they leave your site. The most effective advertisers are able to view the whole picture and optimize each piece of it, balancing engine and profit optimization along the way. Therefore it’s important to make your data work for you from multivariate testing to pre/ post-click experiences. Spend some time understanding the data. It’ll be well worth your time and make you a more efficient marketer.

Ever wondered how bid changes would really affect your account? Do you put a lot of thought into bids when setting up your account? Well according to Siddharth Shah, subtle differences in bids are more important than people think. Check out the science of bidding to see how your bids are affecting your account.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

The exciting thing about search marketing is that people’s search behaviors are always changing; this can depend on the time of year, trends or new developments in the industry. But how do you stay ahead of these changes and more importantly, what do you do to counteract any negative effects in your accounts? In this post, I’ll focus on understanding traffic trends in your PPC accounts and in my follow-up post I will talk about how to effectively leverage your findings to benefit your account.

Digging-in To Your Account

There are many tools out there to help you understand traffic patterns for your campaigns. However, the first place you need to look is in your PPC account. Start out by running a campaign report for the last few years. Under settings choose “monthly” as your unit of time. Alternatively, set your time range and look at a graph for impressions and clicks in the interface. Either of these tools should give you insights into when traffic drops or spikes occurred. Are there any patterns in your data? Now start thinking about what events (good or bad) happened during those time periods:

• Did you make any significant changes in your account during those times? The “View Change History” tool can be very insightful.
• Did something big happen in the industry?
• Is seasonality a factor for your product or service?

Drill down even further by pulling keyword placement performance reports. Some keywords might be affected by seasonality as well. Certain keywords may have been star performers for a few years, but have dropped off in performance even if their average position hasn’t changed much over time. Pull out these keywords and use Google Trends to further trouble shoot. Searchers might be using different search terms than they did a year ago. Along with Google Trends, your Google Analytics can also help you identify search patterns based on geography.

What Are Your Competitors Doing?

Keep an eye on your competitors – know what they’re doing, not only in the PPC space, but other marketing efforts as well. It is easy to get sucked in to the PPC world, but take those blinders off. Your competitors maybe running compelling awareness-building offline campaigns that are driving searchers to click on their PPC ads as well. Your traffic might be directly impacted by what your competitors are doing.

What Is Going On In The Industry?

You may want to set up Google alerts for your most important keywords and try to catch-up on some industry news on a weekly basis. Traffic may spike if there is a huge surge in your industry or tank if there is some bad publicity, so keep on top of what’s going on and think through what that might mean for you PPC account.

I’ve recapped several ways in which you can start identifying changes in your PPC traffic. In my next post, I will discuss how to utilize the knowledge that you have about search patterns to maximize your account performance.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

While working with a client this morning, I logged into Google Webmaster Central to take a look at the top search queries driving traffic. What I discovered was one heck of a useful upgrade!

Rather than simply providing keywords, positions and click-throughs, Google has upgraded the interface to a Google Analytics-style interface. Since ranking now varies based on personal search profiles, Google now provides you with the range of positions your URL was found in, as well as total number of impressions and the click-through rate.

Too many companies ignore their search rankings and the click-through rate off the search engine results page (SERP). Just as you would optimize your page to increase conversions, you should also optimize your page title and meta description to increase conversions. If you’re ranking #1 through #3 and getting under 10% of the clicks, you’ve got some work to do. You should be getting 50% and up!

This new interface is a great visualization of the data. Once I was able to review the page with my client this morning, we could see the incredible opportunity ahead of us for driving high volumes of traffic to the site with improved optimization and ranking.

Don’t settle on analytics to optimize your site for conversions – take it a step back and ensure you’re fully leveraging search engines first. Analytics only provide you with details for visitors who actually clicked-through… not the ones that were left behind!

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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My kids are always making fun of me for my love of animated movies – I simply can’t get enough of them. As I was watching Madagascar 2, I loved this scene where the red light begins flashing on and off… watch how it’s handled by the penguins at the wheel:

It’s too bad that Analytics don’t always have flashing red lights “designed to indicate something out of the ordinary” as well as the manuals on how to fix them. Of course – even if they did – as long as the plane was still flying, they’d probably choose to do nothing.

Organizations are also mesmerized by growing numbers (as am I!). The problem is that there are typically stories within the numbers that should be flashing red bulbs. It’s your job as a Marketer to find them… perhaps a significant drop in keyword traffic, or a referring site that pops up out of nowhere.

The closest we get to a manual is the ongoing advice of folks like Avinash Kaushik and analytics best practices blogs. What kind of red lights have you uncovered (or ignored) in your Analytics?

Perhaps you should do something about it before the plane goes down! Or do you find your Analytics Reports “pretty and somewhat hypnotic”?

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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• Google Killed the Google Analytics Star (6)
• How to Check Your Domain’s Rank by Keyword (1)
• Is the Google Cookie Crumbling? (2)
• 4 Questions to Ask Your Website Visitor (0)
• Fired: MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog Widgets (10)

One of the challenges of working in an agency environment is that, while it helps get the work done, multiple people touch an account, and you run the risk of creating inconsistencies. When you need to know that your data is accurate it’s nice to know that you and your team have taken a few minutes in the beginning to set up a system for URL building and tracking.

Once you have your Google Ad Words account linked with your Google Analytics account, you gain an immense amount of insight into the customer behavior and site interaction driven by your Ad Words campaigns, but what about the traffic that comes from your Yahoo! and Bing PPC campaigns, or your email campaigns? Why wouldn’t you want to know as much as possible? Especially when it’s so easy to get!

URL Tracking Parameters

Want to track your Bing PPC campaigns? No problem! Want to track the clicks that come from various links in your email campaigns? No problem! All you have to do is follow these simple steps, and you will be up to your eyeballs in data that will help you better understand your customers and get you on a path to making informed decisions about all of your campaigns (PPC or otherwise). The easiest way to get started is to use the Google Analytics URL builder, because it will walk you through each step, and automatically generate a URL with the additional parameters you wish to track. So let’s walk through what each parameter is for:

1. Website URL: This is where you enter the URL that you want to add the tracking parameters to. This can be any webpage; so don’t feel like you have to start directing traffic only to your homepage.
2. Campaign Source: This is required, and it represents the source where your visit came from. This is a high-level parameter; so think of Google, Bing, and Business.com when filling this section out.
   Be Consistent! When entering this information remember that capitalization DOES matter. If you enter ‘Google’ for one link and ‘google’ for a second link, you will end up with two separate sources in Analytics.
3. Campaign Medium: This is also required, and is used to define the type of marketing medium you are using such as CPC, or an email.
   Be Consistent! Like the campaign parameter, the medium is case sensitive. It is also important to note that Analytics automatically uses ‘CPC’ to define the ad words pay per click, so use it when you define ANY pay per click medium. This will help keep your reporting clean in Analytics so you don’t have to run multiple filters to gather your data.
4. Campaign Term: This parameter, while not mandatory, can come in very handy when you want to track your campaigns down to a keyword level. This type of granular data can be used to help you optimize bids in your PPC accounts.
   Be Consistent! If you are going to set up a keyword level parameter in one ad group or campaign, do it for your entire account. While the URL builder is a fantastic tool, don’t forget about using excel to create mass URLs. (Check out the second section of this post for tips and tricks.)
5. Campaign Content: This parameter is also optional, and can help you differentiate ads or set up A/B testing. This parameter should be used when you have a destination URL that can be reached through more than one link. Say, for example, you have two images on your email. If they both point to the same category page on your site, but you want to know which image is clicked on more often, you can include the content parameter so you will be able to easily identify each link in Analytics.
   Be Consistent! If you are going to use this parameter, think about your naming structure before you start. You wouldn’t want to pick names like image1 and image2, because when you see those later in Analytics you won’t have any idea what they are. Once again, you can use excel to help you lay out a naming convention for each type of campaign and/or medium you foresee using.
6. Campaign Name: This is the name of your campaign, newsletter, or email. This field is also required, and will need to be descriptive enough so you know what it was later on.
   Be Consistent! Just like the content parameter, it’s a good idea to lay out a naming convention that you would like to use. This will help everyone in your company understand how to create names that will be consistent and easy to identify in Analytics as time goes on.
   1. Define your URLs and the parameters you want to include. The most important thing you can do is make sure that your worksheet is set up in an easy to use, and easy to understand fashion. My sheets usually look something like this when I get started:

   

   You can see how I’ve defined my URL, all of the parameters I’m going to use, and I have a list of the keywords I will be including after the “utm_term” parameter at the end.

   2. Concatenate your parameters. So some of you might be thinking “concate-what???” But don’t worry! Even though it’s not the easiest thing to say, it’s a simple formula that helps you pull multiple fields together into one long string. Before you dive in, consider these few tips:
      • Start with a question mark. Before you add any parameters to the end of your URL, you must add in a question mark. From then on, each parameter will need to be separated with an ampersand (&).
      • Think of each cell as a thought in a sentence, and remember to separate them each with a comma in your string.
        Example: If you are concatenating cells A1, B1, and C1 your formula will look like this: =concatenate(A1,B1,C1)
      • Use quotation marks when adding text to your string. Remember that spaces count as text, so put quotes around your spaces, and you will be all set.
        Example: If you want to add spaces between each of the cells you concatenated in the first tip it would then look like this: =concatenate(A1,” “,B1,” “,C1) Notice that the spaces are a “thought” in your string, so they are also separated with commas.
      • Use a $ before each part of a cell that you want to remain constant. When you copy formulas across or down a worksheet, the cells will move with you unless you make them constant.
   3. Double-check your formula. Once you have included all of the cells, look at the end result of your URL to make sure everything is there. In order to create the URL for the first keyword in the screen shot below, I used the following formula in cell B11:

   =CONCATENATE(B1,”?”,A3,B3,C1,A4,B4,C1,A5,B5,C1,A7,A11)

   

   And it returned this URL:

   http://www.hanapinmarketing.com?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=CPC&utm_campaign=New SEO Boy Blog Launch&utm_term=hanapin

   4. Eliminate spaces. When you are creating a URL it’s important to remember that spaces are not allowed, and it is a best practice to replace them with hyphens. There are two ways that you can make sure spaces are eliminated from your URLs:
      1. Find and replace spaces with hyphens after you have created all of your URLs.
      2. Include a nested substitution formula as you build your URLs.

   Nesting formulas is just the act of combining more than one formula. I wanted to replace the spaces in my campaign name with a hyphen, so I replaced “B5” in my original formula with a substitution formula, and the end result looks like this:
   =CONCATENATE(B1,”?”,A3,B3,C1,A4,B4,C1,A5,SUBSTITUTE(B5,” “,”-”),C1,A7,A11)

   5. Set your constants. Because we have a list of five keywords in the screen shot above, we need to make sure that all of the other cells in our formula don’t change. To do this I added a $ before each letter and number for the cells I want to stay the same. Note: I did not make the keyword cell constant, because I want that to change as I move down the list.

   =CONCATENATE($B$1,”?”,$A$3,$B$3,$C$1,$A$4,$B$4,$C$1,$A$5,SUBSTITUTE($B$5,” “,”+”),$C$1,$A$7,A11)

   6. Apply the formula to the rest of your sheet. Once you have verified that your constants are set you can pull the formula down the rest of the sheet, which in this case would be for the other four keywords.

   

   7. Test! Test a handful of the URLs you have created to make sure they go to the correct page, and they contain the correct information.

   For those of you who didn’t give up through this – CONGRATS! Working in excel can certainly seem daunting, but remember that you can always hit escape if something goes wrong, and the best way to learn is to keep trying. Taking the time to learn helpful functions like this will only shave time off of your account work later, so always keep your eyes out for ways to make excel (or any program for that matter) work for you.

Once you’ve entered all of the necessary information the tool will create a URL that you can copy and paste. Be sure to check it for any strange characters, and be sure to replace spaces with hyphens to follow best practices.

Advanced URL Creation: Using Excel

As I said, the URL builder is a great way to get started, but once you understand what kind of parameters you can use, it’s important to also know how you can create a mass quantity of URLs in a short amount of time. For these projects I turn to excel, so I wanted to also include a few tips and tricks on how you can do a larger scale URL project.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

That sinking feeling in your stomach may actually be coming from your browser. Don’t look now, but Google plans to release a browser plugin that will allow users to opt out of being tracked by … Google Analytics.

Um, what?

Google, leading search provider and the horsepower behind the popular Google Analytics web traffic analytics tool, is going to allow users to avoid being tracked by their own tool.

This brings up a number of questions and possible implications for webmasters and web marketers who use Google Analytics to track website traffic, primarily how usage of the plugin will affect collection of site traffic data. This begs another possibly more important question: why would Google do this when Google Analytics doesn’t collect personal data in the first place?

First things last, it depends on what can be considered “personal” data. Does your ISP information and geographic location count as personal? Google Analytics does not collect individual IP addresses, meaning that all information tracked is completely anonymous.

Does this put Google in the category of “total hypocrites” since they can keep an indefinite record of users’ search history? Perhaps. Search history allows Google to deliver those amazing personalized search results, and while they have made it easier to opt out of this feature with their Privacy Center, they don’t exactly go out of their way to advertise this possibility. It also bears mention that a privacy group has asked the Federal Trade Commission to open an investigation into Google Buzz, so Google may be stinging just a bit on the privacy front.

The uproar has been voluminous and high profile, but my first reaction was “So?” How many people are even aware they have a Google Profile, let alone that they can edit this profile and adjust their privacy settings and ad preferences? I was not able to quickly locate any empirical data, but what is the total percentage of web users who use the AdBlock Plus plugin for Firefox? It’s probably not great enough to put it outside the standard deviation.

My basic point is that for webmasters and marketers, this move may sell more subscriptions to Omniture and WebTrends as those of us behind the curtain want access to as much data as possible. But that move may be a knee-jerk reaction to a problem that doesn’t yet–and may never–exist.

This post was written by Matt Chandler

Matt is the Vice President of Content Strategy for Raidious Digital Content Services. He has over 10 years’ experience managing online content for enterprise organizations including NYU Langone Medical Center, Community Health Network and the Indiana Higher Education Telecommunication System. He also has a ridiculous vinyl record collection and a pug named George Benson.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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With software as a service (SaaS) vendors like Compendium, you delegate a subdomain and host your blog on a different subdomain than your website. Commonly, this is accomplished with blog.domain.com and www.domain.com. Typically companies implement a totally separate account in Google Analytics to monitor the blog subdomain. It’s actually not necessary.

Google Analytics will allow you to monitor multiple subdomains within a single profile. To do this, you simply add a line of code to your current Google Analytics script:

<script type="text/javascript">
try{
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxx-x");
pageTracker._setDomainName(".example.com");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}
</script>

You’re not done yet! If you simply do that, you run the issue of identical paths being measured under a single URl in Google. So – if you have index.php on your blog and www subdomains, they’ll both be measured as index.php. That’s not good. As a result, you have to do some fancy advanced filtering in the account!

Login to Google Analytics and click Edit on your Google profile. Scroll down the page where you can add a filter and add an advanced filter with the following settings:

Now your profile should distinguish the subdomain throughout all the Analytics Account.

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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Google Analytics is instrumental in the way we track the success of our PPC campaigns (especially since it’s free), but as robust as it is, there are certain visitors that just can’t be tracked. There are at least 6 types of those visitors, but today I’m going to focus solely on those that have their JavaScript turned off, and what it can mean for your PPC campaigns.

What is JavaScript?
JavaScript in the simplest sense is a scripting language that uses browsers to do the work for a command. For example, you may have a landing page that highlights a phone number at the top. However, for tracking purposes, you may want to show a different phone number to any visitor that comes to your landing page from a PPC ad. You can use JavaScript to automatically show the second number to anyone visiting from your ad, and show the first number to everyone else.

How JavaScript Can Affect Your Tracking
Though few people know how to, it is possible for an end user to turn off their JavaScript, and this will certainly affect the accuracy of your tracking. One of our clients uses a click-to-call strategy, so they have landing pages that show dynamic phone numbers based on the type of visitor. During a recent data review, we realized our PPC campaigns were not creating the expected amount of calls for this time of year. After running a few tests on our ads and landing pages, we were still unsure of the reason, so we turned to our analytics data.

Within Google Analytics the Visitors section holds a plethora of information on not only who your visitors are, but how they see your site based on browsers, operating systems, and so on. Also included in this section is Java Support where you can see how many visitors don’t have JavaScript enabled.

In order to see if this was the cause of the lowered PPC driven calls, we first changed the Default Segment to Paid Search Traffic only so we could be sure we were analyzing the correct visitor segment.

Remember that we were looking for a reason why the number of sales calls attributed to PPC had fallen. From the graph below, we were able to quickly see that the percentage of visitors that had their JavaScript disabled matched very closely with the decrease in sales calls, so we were ready to do another test.

After turning off our Java and JavaScript capabilities within our own browsers (usually found in the tools or preferences section of your toolbar), we were able to test our ad landing pages again, and instantly found the issue. No matter what ad we came to the landing page from, the phone number shown was generic, and would therefore not attribute a call to our ad.

If you find that you are having tracking issues due to a lack of JavaScript support, there are different solutions you can come up with, depending on your time and budget. Making individual landing pages would help, because you eliminate the need for dynamic content. If using JavaScript is the most efficient solution for you or your client, make sure that the default landing page is unique from all other pages so you can still gather usable data.

No matter what type of campaign you run, it’s important to understand who is seeing your ads, and reacting to them. Using your PPC data in conjunction with your analytics data will help you gain a better understanding of the full user experience, and help you effectively track customers while fulfilling their needs.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

I wrote another post on how to track multiple authors in WordPress with Google Analytics once before, but got it wrong! Outside the WordPress Loop, you’re unable to capture the author names so the code did not work.

Sorry for the fail.

I’ve done some additional digging and found out how to do it smarter with multiple Google Analytics profiles. (Quite honestly – this is when you come to love professional analytics packages like Webtrends!)

Step 1: Add a Profile to an Existing Domain

The first step is to add an additional profile to your current domain. This is an option that most people aren’t familiar with but works perfectly for this type of scenario.

Step 2: Add an Include Filter to the New Author Profile

You’ll want to only measure page views tracked by authors in this profile, so add a filter for the subdirectory /author/. One note on this – I had to make “that contain” as the operator. Google’s instructions call for a ^ before the folder. In fact, you can’t write an ^ into the field!

Step 3: Add an Exclude Filter to your Primary Profile

You won’t want to actually track all the extra pageviews by author in your original Profile, so add a filter to your original profile to exclude the subdirectory /by-author/.

Step 4: Add a Loop in the Footer Script

Within your existing Google Analytics tracking and below your current trackPageView line, add the following loop in your footer theme file:

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
var authorTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxxxx-x");
authorTracker._trackPageview("/by-author/<? echo the_author(); ?>");
<?php endwhile; else: ?>
<?php endif; ?>

This will capture all of your tracking, by author, in a second profile for your domain. By excluding this tracking from your primary profile, you don’t add additional unnecessary pageviews. Keep in mind that if you have a home page with 6 posts, you’ll track 6 pageviews with this code – one for each post, tracked by author.

Here’s how the Author Tracking will look in that specific profile:

If you’ve accomplished this in a different way, I’m open to additional ways to track the author information! Since my Adsense revenue is associated with the profile, I can even see which authors are generating the most ad revenue .

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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If you have a PPC account that allows you to target across the Unites States, try adding geo-targeted campaigns for each of the 50 states to help increase your conversion and click-through rates. In most of my accounts I have inherited, there are several campaigns with very specific keywords that are targeted all across the US or one particular area.

A great way to help increase your CTR and conversion rates is to take your top performing keywords, and put them into new campaigns, targeting each state individually. When you write your ad text, be sure that state’s name is in your title and if possible in your description line. This will help increase your click through rates because even if people aren’t typing in a state or location specific keyword, tailoring your ad text to the users location still makes it a custom ad specific to that user.

In addition to tailoring your ad texts to that particular location, you can also customize your landing pages by using dynamic landing pages for a particular location. Now personally I think making 50 different landing pages with a state name in the title is a bit much. However you can create one landing page with dynamic titles that will change depending on the users search query.

I would try testing out a few of your top performing locations before making the big leap into creating 50 different campaigns targeting all 50 states. One place you can look is Google Analytics to find out which location is driving a majority of your traffic. Simply login to your Google Analytics account, under visitors to the left, click on ‘map overlay’. Scroll down below the map and you’ll see a list of countries, click on United States, and that will give you a breakdown of each state within the US. If you sort by visits, then you’ll get the state with the most visits first. You can see in the screen shot below, for my PPC account Indiana and Kentucky drives the majority of traffic to my website. Therefore I could create two new campaigns and landing pages targeting Indiana and Kentucky specifically to increase conversion rates.

Not only can you increase your conversion rates by taking users to a more specific landing page targeted to their location, but you can also increase your click-through rates with your new location targeted ad texts. By increasing your CTR’s you can easily increase your Quality Scores and decrease your cost-per-click without losing position. It’s a win-win situation.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.