In addition to recommending Google Analytics (GA) to our client base, we utilize GA as our analytics platform to track our internal web stats, as well. We are one of a few select companies to be named a Google Analytics Certified Partner (GACP) and according to Google “Certified Partners are carefully vetted by Google and meet rigorous qualification standards”. We are very proud of this honor and continue to educate clients (both large and small) on the ins and outs of GA.

Once GA is implemented onto a website, marketers suddenly find themselves with a wealth of knowledge and information they never had before. I get asked the same question over and over, which boils down to: What should I be looking for? While GA is extremely user friendly, especially compared to other platforms available today, it‘s also remarkably robust, thus making it (seem like) a daunting task to sift through all of the available data. You can literally get lost in GA for hours, discovering new and valuable information pertaining to your web stats. That being said, what should you be looking for? If brand new to GA, I find it a good exercise to simply start with the dashboard. As you become more comfortable, it will be less overwhelming to dive deeper into all of the reports GA has to offer.

GA defines their dashboard as “your customizable collection of report summaries”. Below is a screenshot from GA, which shows some of the default metrics; they can be arranged according to individual user preferences. Each metric can be clicked on in order to get more granular. Although the dashboard is rather basic, there are still a ton of valuable insights such as: Avg. time on site, bounce rate, pageviews, new visits, pages per visit, etc. The Map Overlay feature is particularly useful in determining where your site traffic originates from, plus which areas are converting into sales, leads, etc. You can drill all the way down to city.

All in all, GA is a comprehensive (not to mention free) tool that will prove to be mission critical in determining which online initiatives are fruitful for your business and which could be replaced. Every dollar counts and you ought to be armed with as much knowledge about your web stats as possible. If you have not already done so, check out our analytics page now and get started!

I am one of the last people at MoreVisibility who should be posting to our Analytics blog, but that’s exactly why I think I need to. If you are a regular reader of this blog, I apologize in advance, as the strategy I’m about to encourage is absolutely embarrassingly evident to you. Apologies also to Joe Teixeira, our most prominent Google Analytics expert for cluttering his blog with such low-level concepts.

That said, paying attention to Analytics is not for everybody, but it’s a skill set that someone related to your e-marketing efforts needs to possess if a program is going to be profitably managed in-house.

The options and triggers available today within Google AdWords and Microsoft AdCenter (soon to be powering SEM for both Yahoo and Bing) to incrementally nudge ahead the performance of your paid efforts are too significant to ignore.

Several steps need to occur:

• Properly coding your website and campaigns for Analytics
• Getting familiar with the data that populates
• Customizing the data to suit your program objectives
• Assessing Analytics data and making modifications to the campaigns based on past performance

The SEM industry has evolved to the point where there are typically a handful of companies in any industry / vertical that are adept at SEM and are effectively utilizing Analytics. Those are the firms to keep an eye on and learn from, but that will not realistically happen without an appropriate understanding and commitment to Analytics.

Whoa! The title of this blog post should have hit you like a ton of bricks. You see, I’m combining three different sub-industries together:

SEO = Search Engine Optimization
A/B testing = Well…A/B testing! (Like you can do with Google Website Optimizer)
Google Analytics = Web Analytics

Now, how in the world do we do A/B testing on our SEO efforts while using Google Analytics to evaluate the results?

On June 8th of this year, Google rolled out a new search index called Caffeine. This new search index collects and processes information across the web at a much faster rate of speed and accuracy than the previous search index. This means that you can update your website with new content and it is almost immediately indexed and available to be searched for on Google. Website owners who perform frequent updates to their site benefit the most, as Google will pretty much always have the latest version of your website in their search index.

A new search index that instantly updates itself also means that you can perform A/B testing on your organic search results and use a web analytics platform like Google Analytics to determine the rate of success or failure of your experiment. For example, let’s say that you are the owner of HardwareStore.com, and when a person searches for “hardware shop“, they see this organic listing:

As you know from reading our Search Engine Optimization blog over the years, the listings that you see in organic search results derive from the relevant web page’s “meta” tags (specifically, the title tag and the description tag). Before the launch of Google Caffeine, it would be several weeks, sometimes months, for your organic listings to be updated to reflect changes performed on your meta tags. Now, the changes are practically immediate. You can swap out the title and the description meta tags to deliver a different search engine result to your future website visitors who are searching for you on Google. Essentially, you’re running an A/B experiment to see which organic listing produces the best results.

Then what you can do in about one to two weeks after you’ve updated your meta tags is log-in to your web analytics tool and perform a date-range comparison to see what affect your change had on your site performance and task completion metrics, like in this example from Google Analytics:

As you analyze the above image, you can see that the change in your organic listings resulted in higher revenue and a higher conversion rate, which means that you should most likely keep the new meta tags for a while (but keep an eye on that average order value and crunch the numbers to determine if you really are more profitable in the long-term with a lower average order value and per-visit value).

Presto! You’ve successfully performed an A/B experiment with your SEO efforts, while using web analytics to measure the results!

About a year and a half ago, I wrote an article for our monthly newsletter that it “takes a village to raise a culture of web analytics” in an organization. One person – regardless of how motivated and hard-working he or she is – cannot create a culture of analytics and insights alone. It takes people from within your own organization, across organizations, and on your executive team to buy in to the analytics program and truly become an organization which values insights and data analysis.

I postulate that the same culture-driven approach can be applied to your company – no matter how big or how small – to create an environment where testing, experimentation, and optimization come first. As you know from reading our blog over the years, we here at MoreVisibility love Google Website Optimizer, a free A/B and multivariate experimentation tool. With Google Website Optimizer, you can create experiments rather quickly and efficiently and get excellent insights as to how your visitors are reacting to the new pages or new variations that you’re sending their way.

Creating a Google Website Optimizer experiment involves some important people that either work directly for you or that you’ve hired to do work for you (depending on your situation). It also involves six steps – from creating the account to installing the JavaScript snippets to launching your experiment – that you and your fellow colleagues, companies or vendors must participate in to ensure that your Google Website Optimizer experiment is a success.

Today, I’m outlining the six critical steps that need to be taken to successfully create and initiate your Google Website Optimizer experiment. Let’s begin!

Step 1: Deciding What to Test
People Needed: Site Owner, IT / Webmaster, Marketer, Web Analyst, Web Designer
Objective: To come up with a crystal-clear picture of what will be tested (what page, what section, what page is the conversion page) and what type of experiment will be run (A/B or Multivariate).
What You Need to Know: This first step should be a meeting with everyone that will be involved in this process, because it is a team effort. Everyone from the owner of the website to the IT guru should be heard and should have something to say about the upcoming experiment. At this step, you’ll decide on two major things: what you will be testing and what type of experiment you want to run with. If you want to do a simple experiment involving an original page and a variation (or “B” page), then the A/B experiment is your best bet. If you have lots of ideas that you want to test on a single page, go with the multivariate experiment. If you’re not sure, you can’t miss by choosing an A/B experiment.

Step 2: Creating the Necessary Pages or Variations
People Needed: IT / Webmaster, Web Designer, Site Owner
Objective: To actually create and upload the variation pages or variation sections (image and text) to use in the forthcoming experiment.
What You Need to Know: Once everything has been decided on, your web designer will actually create the variation page(s) or variation sections for use in your experiment. Once the web designer has done their work, the site owner should be involved to give the green light on any images or mock-ups to proceed. Once the site owner OK’s the variations, they need to be uploaded to the web server (Google Website Optimizer needs to verify that the variation page(s) exist).

Step 3: Creating the experiment in Google Website Optimizer
People Needed: Web Analyst or Marketer
Objective: Creating the Google Website Optimizer experiment and verifying that the pages to be used are on the web (uploaded to your web server).
What You Need to Know: The person who will be in charge of creating the experiment in Google Website Optimizer, which is almost always the web analyst or the marketing person, will go in and start creating the experiment within Google Website Optimizer. They will enter in the URLs of the original, variation, and conversion pages for verification, and grab the JavaScript snippets for the IT / Webmaster to install.

Step 4: Installing the JavaScript Snippets
People Needed: Web Analyst or Marketer, IT / Webmaster
Objective: Working with the IT department or Webmaster to install and verify the JavaScript snippets on the experiment pages.
What You Need to Know: The IT / Webmaster will follow the on-screen instructions provided by the web analyst or marketer and install the JavaScript snippets that need to be installed on all pages involved in the experiment. They will work with the web analyst or marketer to confirm that this has been done exactly as outlined by Google Website Optimizer.

Step 5: Reviewing the Experiment
People Needed: Web Analyst or Marketer
Objective: To review the entire experiment set-up and preview experiment pages before launch.
What You Need to Know: This is the time to review that everything looks good and that there are no design flaws or broken HTML on the experiment pages. If everything looks okay, the web analyst or marketer will launch the experiment!

Step 6: Launching the Experiment
People Needed: Web Analytics or Marketer, Site Owner
Objective: To activate the Google Website Optimizer experiment!
What You Need to Know: Once the Google Website Optimizer experiment launches, it’s important that the owner of the website is made aware that some visitors to his or her site will start to experience different variations of the site. It’s also important to let the experiment run its course naturally (without influencing it by making changes to the web pages involved in the experiment). After a few weeks, everyone on the Google Website Optimizer experiment team should meet and review the report data that the web analyst and marketer will love to analyze and derive insight from.

By following these six steps with the members of your organization, you are destined to succeed, while at the same time, creating a new culture of optimization and experimentation in your company!

Every website owner using Google Analytics has access to two unique reports that can display an insight into the sales cycle of your online business. These reports are called the Visits to Purchase and the Days to Purchase reports, and they are found within the Ecommerce report section. You will find the reports at the very bottom of the navigation menu (the last two reports in the Ecommerce section).

As you can see in the screen-shot below, a horizontal bar graph represents the number of visits it takes users to purchase an item from a particular website’s shopping cart within a given date range. While most visitors on this particular website purchased something after 1 visit (17.93% of all purchases), there are many other groupings of visits that have contributed revenue and transactions for this website, including the group all the way toward the bottom of the screenshot (201+ Visits, 14.32%).

Days to Purchase in Google Analytics

You can use this data to learn more about your customers’ behavior online, specifically, when they are on your website and purchasing something from your Ecommerce system. Is your website able to turn sales around in fewer or greater visits? Does it take many days (weeks or possibly months) before customers buy something from you? Have you applied an Advanced Segment in Google Analytics and compared segments, such as New vs. Returning?

Using this data can help your marketing and website optimization efforts as you learn about your website’s sales cycle. Most website owners would love it if every visitor converted on their first visit, but that isn’t always going to be the case. The easier, more competitive, and user-friendly your website is, the faster someone will become a customer of yours.