Achieving Business Results with Google Analytics

When we talk to clients about how they use their web analytics, many confess to having only a vague understanding of the results or what to do about what they learn. Reviewing website analytics should never be a passive drain on your time. If you don’t know how to interpret the trends that appear, you could be missing out on your vast potential to achieve business results and gain competitive advantage through analytics.

Fear not. By focusing on the capabilities provided by Google Analytics, you can unlock the mysteries of analytics and make critical changes to your website that will deliver business goals.

Identify your core website objectives

One of the most important aspects of getting the most out of your analytics package is to understand what you are measuring and why. If you identify an objective for your site that is carefully aligned to your business goals, you can better prioritize the demands placed on you to update your site. Everything you do from adding content to redesigning the home page and spending money on advertisements can be measured against your objective and prioritized accordingly.

Common Website Objectives

The majority of websites fall into one of three categories based on their primary objective: e-commerce, lead generating and informational/authoritative.

With the core objective of your website in mind, you should develop a list of goals for the website designed to support the main objective. If yours is an e-commerce site, you might list among your goals increasing sales, increasing profitability of each sale and increasing the number of items per sale. If you are a lead generating site, your goals might include increasing the number of qualified leads, decreasing the number of false alarms and reducing the cost to generate a lead. Your informative website goals may include gaining subscribers to your content and having visitors obtain your branded PDF documents and v-cards.

For each of these goals you should define specific strategies and measures for which you can be accountable. For example, on your lead generating site, you might try to increase the number of forms completed on the site. But if those forms aren’t completed by qualified leads you may frustrate your sales staff and require extra resources to create the leads you require. A more appropriate goal might be to refine the content on your site so that what you’re offering more accurately reflects your capabilities. In Google Analytics, you can A/B test your content to see how it performs.

These are just examples. It is important for you to give thought to your own objectives and measurable goals specific to your company and your site.

Goal configuration

There are a number of ways to gather useful information from Google Analytics, but the most productive use of the tool includes going through the exercise of customizing Google Analytics to recognize specific website actions that represent goals. Once you have identified the desired action on your site, you should add that goal to Google Analytics. A goal will track the number of people who came to your site and performed the desired action (i.e., reaching a “thank you” page after submitting a newsletter registration form).

E-commerce sites. The goal for most e-commerce sites is for someone to buy something from you. Think about your checkout process for people buying something from you. A typical flow could be:

Add items to cart -> Click "Checkout" -> Review Order -> Submit Order -> Receive/View Order Confirmation

Lead generating sites. Once someone submits a "contact us" form, you would typically take people to a "thank you" page to let them know that their information was received. You could at that point set some expectations about response time or instruct them to save your email address to their address book for future mailings. The page name might be thanks.html; this is what you should use in the Goal URL field. A typical flow for a lead generating site might be:

Land on Contact Form -> Complete & Submit Form -> Land on Thank you page

Information sites. This is a tricky type of site to track because your individual needs are very specific. Is it that you want people to view a specific page on the website like a manifesto? Do you want people to subscribe to your mailing list? In Google Analytics terms, your “goal” is your site’s money page; the page that you want all of your visitors to read, whether it be a contact form, a biography, a service description, etc.

Evaluate and prioritize your marketing campaigns

Measuring marketing campaigns can be difficult - how can you definitively say that the reason someone came to your site was a direct result of seeing a print ad, clicking a Google ad or clicking a banner on a site? Ads cost money and it is hard to justify marketing spend without numbers to back it up. In fact, it is possible to monitor where people are coming from with no modification beyond adding the basic Google Analytics tracking code on each page of your site.

Google Analytics classifies traffic you receive into three major buckets: search engines, referring sites and direct traffic.

Search Engines

Search engines include Google, Yahoo, MSN and more. Traffic generated by search engines is tracked and available for review in Google Analytics. You will see three sub-tabs beneath the report title under the graph "total," "paid" and "non-paid." While “total” gives you an overview of which search engines are responsible for the bulk of the traffic, it will also include traffic you might have paid for with a pay-per-click campaign as well as "organic results" where your site was featured in the search engine for free. Instead pay attention to the "non-paid" sub-tab to investigate referrals you didn't have to pay for.

Non-paid search

According to various reporting agencies online (and depending on the demographics of your average visitor) you will most likely see around 50 percent of your search engine referral traffic coming from Google. (Yahoo and MSN might make up around 30 percent with the rest being under 5 percent each.) What can you do with this report to make it worth your visit? Assuming you configured your goals as indicated in the first part of the article you can look at the search engine traffic from a new perspective – quality not quantity. If the purpose of your site is to sell widgets, every report you look at in Google Analytics should be driven by a desire to focus your efforts on the areas of your site and your marketing efforts driving the sales of your widgets.

By reviewing reports showing a breakdown of conversion rates by search engine you could determine, for example, that Google refers the majority of your traffic but that visitors are more likely to register for an account on the site if they came from AOL.

Unfortunately the reports can't tell you why things like this happen, but they should start you thinking. In this case, the next step was to go straight to AOL, search for the site and compare the results page to that search to an identical search on Google to see if there are any significant differences. What you find could influence the way you manage the meta content between those pages or the way the pages are written. You may also learn a thing or two about the demographics of your key audience. Are they more likely to use AOL, for instance?

Paid search

Google, MSN and Yahoo support paid search campaigns or sponsored links. For a fee, the search engines will show your ad in a special section of their search results. Every time someone clicks on the ad, the search engines charge you the agreed fee. This is known as pay-per-click (PPC). There isn't enough space here to get into the details of the mechanisms for bidding in this keyword auction but you should know you can run a campaign for as little as a couple of dollars per day. You control the content of the ad including a title, a few lines of text and a link.

Google Analytics natively supports and tags campaigns you create through their PPC program AdWords. If you use MSN and Yahoo's service you will need to create a campaign to correctly identify and classify the traffic driven to your site from their services.

Once you have tagged your campaigns you will begin to see any click-through and conversion data within about 24 hours for a popular program. It's an extra step to set this up but the benefits are critical to maintaining a profitable PPC campaign and spending your marketing dollars in the right place.

PPC providers generally only report on click-thrus as a way to measure your traffic – and who wouldn't want keywords sending the most visitors to your site? A review of this for a client, Lipkin & Higgins, revealed that of their top 10 keywords, 5 keywords had failed to deliver a single conversion despite delivering cumulatively 170 visitors to the site. By pruning or reworking the campaigns performing poorly you can reallocate your PPC spending periodically to deliver much better return on investment.

Referring Sites

Referring site traffic is generated when a visitor arrives on your site by clicking a link, banner, image or ad on a page from someone else's site. This includes a pretty large scope since banners and ads are typically paid and should be segmented out accordingly. It's important to segment the visitors to your site so you can understand whether the banners and ads you pay for drive traffic and conversions in the same way your PPC traffic does.

Your investment to your website should be focused on increasing your conversion rate. Google Analytics reports can show you which referring sites are delivering the best conversion rate to your site. Unless you get significant referral traffic the numbers will probably be small. However, if you see some clear leaders in terms of referrals leading to a good conversion rate, these are the people to reward (or send thank you gifts).

Ultimately the unpaid referrals are something you can try to influence but have little control over. Looking at your ad campaigns this way can help you decide whether you are spending your money effectively.

Direct Traffic

Direct traffic is traffic from visitors who already know your URL and enter it directly into their browser. Direct traffic typically includes all the referrals from your offline advertising campaigns. This is a pretty broad group and can be the hardest group to understand because it is such a generic bucket.

So how do you get any insight into where people are coming from? One way is to create campaigns with the Google URL Builder tool but the URLs it generates are pretty ugly. People don't typically remember URLs like: sitename.com/landing.cfm?utm_12345... They do, however, usually remember things like newsletters.sitename.com or sitename.com/newsletter. You can create a redirect for either of these options to the long, ugly URL. When you set up a redirect like this, your web server invisibly takes people to the right page including all the correct tags so that Google Analytics can pick up the information and provide more detail. You can have as many campaigns as you like and they are all tracked.

Armed with this information you can compare the relative effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns to generate revenue and, if you assigned a value to each of your goals, see an average for the amount of revenue generated by visitors referred by each campaign. It would be nice, for instance, to be able to say that your September newsletter generated $15,000 in revenue but cost just $1,000 to develop. The information collected in Google Analytics can help you evaluate where you spend your marketing dollars and even help you get approval to invest more resources into a channel.

Understand your site’s content and your visitors’ behavior

Once you’ve generated traffic to your website and you’re measuring, managing and optimizing your traffic sources, you must turn your attention to your website content. Do you know on what page your site visitors arrive? Do they find the information they want when they get there? What steps do you take to measure this and improve your site’s performance?

Think of your website as a funnel, or perhaps a bunch of funnels, where you can measure what enters the top and leaves the bottom of the funnel. Entering your funnel would be your site visitors who, we’ve learned, come from search, referring links, emails, etc. What comes out of the funnel are leads, sales, newsletter registrations, v-card downloads or whatever you’ve created to advance your business proposition.

What is not so simple to understand is what site visitors actually do on the website. Do they leave immediately? Do they get lost or distracted? Acquiring this insight may help you stimulate more of the behavior you want. Remember that in the Internet world, the site visitor is in control and will find what they want, not necessarily what you believe is important. Delivering what your targeted and productive site visitors want is a good idea no matter what the objective of your website.

Content Prioritization

Content-specific pages on which traffic first enters the website are called landing pages. The rich content on the interior pages of your website are ripe opportunities to stimulate search and referral traffic. Based on your strategic approach to your site design, these pages may be intentional landing pages or they may simply be so content rich and in-demand that they serve as “Google food” and make a great meal for search engines to serve prominently to people seeking your information.

Google Analytics will help you identify the content of your website that is driving traffic as well as that which is not driving traffic. From this you can both measure and manage the extent to which your web content and the traffic it drives are consistent with your business. If you have limited time or budget for adding content to the site, you need to know which areas to focus on for driving the business goals.

Perhaps you believed that most everyone came to your website through the home page, but you see that visitors enter through many different pages. These are your landing pages. Look at the top pages that represent 80 percent of your website entries. Do they fall into certain groups that suggest a particular content interest such as publications or case studies? Are important pages or sections of your website unrepresented in the top landing pages? If so, there’s work to do to make these important pages more appealing. Google Analytics displays green bars representing pages whose bounce rate is less than the site average. The red bars highlight the pages where the bounce rate is greater than the site average.

Bounces. A visit to your website that goes no further than the first page is called a bounce. As a rule, a one page visit to a website would be hard to characterize as a good thing. One- thousand visitors to your home page might be a good day (or hour, or week) but when 900 of those visitors abandon the site from the same page on which they arrived you could have a problem. Chances are you’ve missed the expectations of 90 percent of your visitors, or you attracted a great deal of unqualified visitors who simply left disappointed. Most websites publishers want more than merely “eyeballs” on their site. As such, you should know what landing pages are causing site visitors to bounce.

It is important to keep in mind that the “site average” for bounces is neither a good place nor bad place to be. In the example above, the bounce rate is about 38 percent. Your goal should be to constantly try to reduce the overall percentage of bounces while still moving your important landing pages as far into the “green” as possible. You can never eliminate all bounces, and some bounces are not bad. For example, a search for your contact information may provide the site visitor exactly what they need without further digging or browsing. If they leave the site to email or call you, that would be an excellent conversion to a meaningful business goal. The lesson is to manage bounces, but do not be traumatized by them.

Content Ideation

Content ideation is simply establishing what your site is about and how you portray that to visitors. It is no secret that the text content on your website is a fundamental driver of search engine referrals. While many invoke incantations or voodoo to gain search prominence, the best practice is to have well-written website pages that are laser-focused on subject matter using words and phrases that match the words and phrases people use when they search. Sure there is more to it, but this is the blocking and tackling of search engine optimization and gaining search traffic.

Google Analytics helps you understand the keywords that site visitors have used to find you. Expand that list using free keyword research tools such as Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool or Yahoo’s Overture. Several fee-based tools such as WordTracker are also available for keyword research.

Once you have created a keyword inventory, review the content on your website and establish a priority for continual content updates. Using these strategies you can build quality landing page content around the subject matter your targeted visitors are seeking and using the keywords and phrases they use to find your subject matter.

Website Visitor Behavior

Knowing why your visitors didn’t complete your navigational obstacle course and reach your cheese bait is your first step toward improving your site’s performance. It is not necessary or particularly feasible to follow each site visitor as they travel through your site. Google Analytics will track this information and present it to you.

A common use of website visitor behavior is for understanding where and why a consumer will leave the check out process of a commerce site. In this case, the benefits of keeping the visitor moving toward the purchase are starkly obvious. But this same process can be utilized to understand the paths taken after leaving a landing page or the paths followed (or not) for reaching some other site objective.

Page Navigation

By carefully selecting your pages of interest and developing a little process, you will eventually begin to identify traffic patterns that characterize visitor behavior around certain kinds of content. Knowing how people got to a certain page on your site and where it went when it left will help give you a holistic view of the traffic generated by your important landing pages. Did most or a lot of the traffic come to this page as an entrance page? If so, did it come from search or referral links? If from search, what keywords drove visitors here? Did visitors leave immediately or did they go on to look at other content? What top content was visited after they left this page?

With your business objectives in mind and your website goals being measurable, your task is to increase the productivity of this traffic by helping it move toward your goals.

Goal Navigation

If you have made the effort to set up goals in Google Analytics, you have more resources for tracking a visitor’s behavior toward this goal. Some goals require a series of specific steps to be reached, for example a commerce shopping cart or a multi-page questionnaire. Knowing where visitors abandon the required steps will help you improve the process.

Some goals may not require a series of steps. For example, signing up for a newsletter might be done from anywhere on the site, but you still may wish to know which sections of your site are more successful attracting registrations and which are not. Or you may wish to test placing the registration option in different places to see if it is effective. In all these cases Google Analytics can help answer your questions.

Conclusion

Few good things are easily achieved. And this is true about improving website performance. The web focuses many of your business issues and puts them on display to be measured and evaluated. Yet, for the opportunist, the chance to drive business performance is irresistible and rewarding.

Google Analytics, is the first universally available, cheaply implemented and robust web analytics tool for marketers. Implementing the tool on a website is the easy part. Knowing how to configure the application for your purposes, understand the performance reports and take an effective action is the challenge. In this case, technology is easy, marketing is hard.

When your website is conceived with objectives and harnessed with measurable goals, your analytics will give you objective outcomes. Based on this information, you can influence both the quantity and quality of visitors and help you provide them a satisfying experience that also meets your business objectives. It may not be easy. But it is clearly the next competitive advantage when business meets on the web.