Google announced a revision to Secure Search on Tuesday, October 18, 2011.  The change went mostly unnoticed by casual Google Analytics users, but swept through the online marketing and analytics communities like wildfire.  One week later, we would like to show an example of how the change is affecting Google Analytics reports.

But first, let us answer the question: “What changed?”

A user who is logged into Google, whether Google+, Gmail, or another Google property, conducts a  search through the Google Search Engine for “pumpkin carving kit” and lands on a site selling the aforementioned item. 

Prior to October 18, 2011, the owner of the landing page (assuming they have Google Analytics properly set-up), could pull the Organic Search Traffic report in Google Analytics (under Traffic Sources, Sources, Search, Organic) and see “pumpkin carving kit” amongst other search queries that delivered organic traffic.

 

After October 18, 2011, the owner of the landing page could pull the same report, but now, the search query “pumpkin carving kit” would not be present.

Example of Google Analytics Data After Revised Secure Search

 

The above screen shot clearly shows that the change took affect on October 18, 2011 and that this web property sees “(not provided)” instead of specific search queries.

Where can I read more information?

Read the post from 10/18/2011 on the Official Google Blog, entitled “Making Search More Secure” for technical details and our October Newsletter article entitled “Google Search Change Impacts Analytics Data.”

Our last Analytics Blog post, entitled Google Plus: How To See Google Plus Posts, took a look inside Google’s Advanced Search features to find public posts by those using Google Plus in relation to a specific keyword or keyphrase.  We would now like to share with you an alternative for searching for Google Plus posts on Google:

Meet Topsy, a social search engine, which has come out with a search engine specifically for Google Plus:

 

http://plus.topsy.com/
   
The front page includes a search bar and the top trending social posts of the day.  If you click on the hyperlinked title, “To the point I guess” for example, you are taken to the source, in this case the Google Plus post which shows the shares below.  Also note that this Google Plus member chose to share her location publically.

 

https://plus.google.com/105006381068870463173/posts/JS3avBjsUgX

If you click on the orange word bubble paired with a number ( ) you are taken to a Topsy page that displays tweets and other posts about the post in question. 

Topsy uses pretty standard search operators; you can find the list of operators here.

An example search for “apple iphone” resulted in the following:

 

http://plus.topsy.com/s?q=%22apple+iphone%22

A few things to note here:

1. The default is the Past 1 Day.  Similarly to the previous blog post’s mention of Google’s search, you can adjust the time frame.
2. You may want to select “English” as the language of preference.  The first result here is in Russian.
3. There is a feature here that may go unnoticed, the Experts section under Search.

 

http://plus.topsy.com/s/%22apple+iphone%22/expert

The Search by Expert section allows you to drill down into exactly who is talking about you, your business, or your product, along with what they are saying and how often they are saying it.

We are always on the lookout of new ways to monitor presence on the web.  If you have any suggestions or questions, please contact us or leave a comment.

You probably have heard of Google+ – Google’s social network that is taking on Facebook – but, you wondered how you could utilize this channel as Google’s official stance is that the network is not open to brands and businesses yet.  Furthermore, monitoring platforms have not yet realized updates that include Google+ monitoring capabilities.  In the meantime, here’s one way you can monitor your brand’s presence on Google+. 

For this example, let’s look at Netflix.  They have been creating a lot of buzz recently due to the price increase and option of physical or digital movie distribution.

Step 1: Visit Google and type “site:plus.google.com Netflix” – click the Google Search button. (Note: If you have Google Instant turned on, you will need to disable it first.)

 

http://www.google.com/

Step 2: Review your results.  In this case, our search query resulted in 152,000 results.  This example also illustrates a benefit of Google’s foray into social media – Rand Fishkin, an SEO expert whom I have in a Circle on Google+, has shared information on Google+ containing the keyword / Brand “Netflix.”  His post is indicated with his profile image and the words “shared this” as can be seen below.

http://www.google.com/

Step 3: Consider refining your results as needed – 152,000 is a large number of results to sift through.  Click on the words “Advanced search” beneath the blue button with the hourglass icon in the upper right hand of the results page and the below advanced search options page appears.  You can click on the Date section to expand it.  By refining your search to “past 24 hours” you can reduce the total number of results shown.

 

http://www.google.com/

Step 4: Review your results.  In the past 24 hours, there were 18 publically available posts on Google+ mentioning Netflix.  Additionally, Google gives searchers the option of sorting by relevance (default) or sorting by date.  Refreshing this page will give you an update of Google+ posts mentioning Netflix as they are shared with the world.  Consider what you could learn by reading through the most recent posts talking about your company name, leading brand, or specific product or service.

 

http://www.google.com/

Unfortunately there is not currently an available function to export these search engine results.

Google+ is still in beta.  Many users are just beginning to find their footing, but early adaptors are as prolific in sharing content on Google+ as they are on other social media platforms. 

If you have any questions or success stories of how you have monitored Google+ for your business, we would love to hear about it in the comments.

L’Shanah Tovah! Yesterday was Rosh Hashanah, which is a celebration of a new year on the Jewish calendar. Happy 5772!

Yesterday wasn’t the only celebration happening around the world. Google Analytics - as they usually do – made three jaw-dropping, industry-shattering announcements yesterday; announcements that could shake the web analytics industry at its very core.

Today, we will talk about one of those three universe-altering announcements. It’s clear that the world wide web is fast. So fast that our decision-making process has evolved to the point that it is simply not acceptable, profitable, or intelligent from a business standpoint to wait weeks, days, or in some cases hours to make decisions based off of your web analytics data. With social media, press-releases, coupon / deal web sites and many others conducting business at the speed of light, those who do web analytics as a part of their jobs need to be able to know what is instantly happening on their web sites, so that they can make on-the-fly changes and analyze the stream of live incoming traffic.

Introducing Google Analytics: Real-Time.

Now, and for some of you within the next few weeks, you will be able to access real-time data in your Google Analytics account. As visitors enter your web site, you will be able to see which pages they enter your web site from, what pages they visit next, their location in the world, and most importantly, what referring attributes are associated with them (campaign, keyword, source, medium, etc…).

What you need to know about Real-Time

There are a lot of details surrounding this new report launch that you should be aware of:

- Real-Time reporting is only available in the new Google Analytics platform. You can access the new Google Analytics platform on the upper-right hand side of the Google Analytics interface.

- For the next few days, Real-Time will be available under the Dashboards tab. Over the next few weeks as Google Analytics refreshes their user-interface, you’ll find Real-Time under the Home button on the top navigation menu.

- Real-Time reports will not process any profile filters that you may have created – it cannot exclude, include, or change traffic data.

- You can sign-up for Real-Time reports via this link, if you don’t want to wait for it to appear in your account.

We hope that you find many use-cases to use Real-Time reports within Google Analytics. Share your comments and feedback below!

Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics, Part 1: The Basics

The big news of the week came from the wonderful folks at Google Analytics, whom introduced the new Multi-Channel Funnels reporting section to the general public.

What is Multi-Channel Funnels?

Multi-Channel Funnels is more than just a new reporting section – it’s a new way of life for advertisers who live and die by customer acquisition (goal completions, outcomes, and sales). Google Analytics has clearly raised the bar and has taken outcome measurement to the next level by showing all visitor paths that led to a conversion or a sale in a 30-day time period, not just showing a visitor’s last click (path) that led to a conversion or a sale.

What Does Multi-Channel Funnels mean for advertisers?

This new “way of life” means that you will be able to associate value (credit) to visitor sessions that transpired before the session that included a visitor conversion. For example, let’s say that a visitor came to your website three different times and converted on the third time to your website. Let’s also say that this visitor came to your site on those three times via the following ways:

1. A non-paid Google Visit (Google Organic)
2. A paid Google Visit (Google AdWords)
3. An email marketing initiative.

Traditionally, Google Analytics would have assigned the conversion for this visitor to the last interaction that occurred before a conversion, namely the email marketing initiative in the above example. The two prior visits from Google, paid and organic, would not have received any credit or attribution for the conversion.

Now, with Multi-Channel Funnels, this visitor’s three interactions from three different traffic sources will all receive attribution for the conversion, which allows advertisers to see a clearer picture of not just one marketing initiative, but the effectiveness of advertiser’s entire marketing strategy.

What reports are available with Multi-Channel Funnels?

Currently, there are five separate reports in the new Multi-Channel Funnels reporting section. You can find Multi-Channel Funnels in your Google Analytics account by clicking on the My Conversions tab on the top navigation menu and clicking on the Multi-Channel Funnels menu item:

The five new reports in this section include:

• Overview. A top-level view of your conversions and your assisted conversions (the conversions that included more than one session to conversion). It includes the following conversion visualizer, where you will begin to see the power and magnitude of this new feature set (broken down into two images below):

• Assisted Conversions. This report will show you which channel grouping conversions included assists. It will also show you which channel groups recorded traditional “last-click” conversions and the value of your conversions. You can toggle this report to show you assists by source, medium, campaign, keyword, or any AdWords dimension by clicking on the appropriate link on the top of the reporting table.

• Top Conversion Paths. This report will show you all of the different paths that visitors have taken in a 30-day time period to convert. This report can be toggled by path length (All paths, 2 or more paths, 3 paths, 4 paths, 5 paths, etc…). You can also toggle this by other traffic sources dimensions, like medium, keyword, or campaign.

• Time Lag. This report gives you a sense of your conversion cycle. How many days, weeks, or months does it take your visitors to convert? What is the value of your visitor conversion cycle? This report aims at breaking this information down in a simple-to-use histogram:

• Path Length. Similar to the Time Lag report, Path Length provides a summary of how many paths (sessions) it is taking visitors to convert on your website.

What else can I do with Multi-Channel Funnels?

A lot more! Not only can you extract rich, valuable insights from this data, you can create your own Conversion Segments, as well as your own Custom Channel Groupings.

Both of those actions are ones that we would consider “more advanced”, so we’ll reserve them for another blog post in the very near future.

Log-in to your Google Analytics today and start interacting with this powerful new report section that will help you see your entire marketing strategy across multiple visitor sessions.

Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics, Part 2: Conversion Segments

About a week and a half ago, we blogged about the new Multi-Channel Funnels reporting suite in the new version of Google Analytics. If you didn’t catch it last time, read that blog post first before continuing with this blog post.

Today, we’re going to kick it up a few notches and showcase one of the two powerful, advanced features of this amazing new functionality known as Conversion Segments. Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics, by itself, is fantastic. Therefore, what would you call Multi-Channel Funnels, given the fact that you can apply default or customize conversion segments for in-depth insights, analysis, and outcomes? Super-fantastic? Hyper-awesome?

Get ready to come up with some hyphenated-adjectives.

Applying Conversion Segments to your Multi-Channel Funnels Reports

In our last blog post, we showed you how Multi-Channel Funnels work, as well as what assists, paths, and time lag were and how they are incorporated into this new reporting section.

Like all data that you see in your Google Analytics account, you are viewing the entire set of collected conversion and Multi-Channel Funnel data when you log-in to your account and click over to this section. Just like you would apply an advanced segment in a standard Google Analytics report to extract valuable insights and perform great analysis, you can apply the equivalent of the Multi-Channel Funnels report section, which are known as Conversion Segments.

At the top of all reports in Multi-Channel Funnels, you’ll see the following Conversion Segments drop-down button as shown in this image:

Upon clicking on the Conversion Segments button, you’ll find nine default conversion segments and check boxes next to each one, which allow you to compare up to four conversion segments simultaneously (just like you can compare up to four advanced segments in the standard Google Analytics reports):

For those of you familiar with advanced segments, you’ll recognize the next screen-shot, which shows a comparison between three conversion segments (First Interaction is Paid Advertising; First Interaction is Direct; and First Interaction is Organic Search):

You can always “un-compare” the conversion segments and view conversion data for all traffic by re-tracing your steps and leaving only All Conversions selected (look at the screen-shot from two images ago).

Creating a New Conversion Segment

On the right-hand side of the drop-down table that appears when you click on the Conversion Segments button, you see a large space underneath a heading of User-Defined Segments. This will be the place where you can come to access and apply any Custom Conversion Segments that you’ve created. In this same area, notice the Create New Conversion Segment link, in blue. You’ll want to click on this link to do exactly what it says.

Again, if you’ve ever created a custom advanced segment, the following procedure should be very familiar to you. With a Custom Conversion Segment, you define the rules for what Google Analytics should show you, when applied within Multi-Channel Funnels.

First, give your Conversion Segment a name. Then, you’ll have to answer some questions about how you want your conversion data to appear. Before we cover that, refer to this next screen-shot to follow along:

After giving your Conversion Segment a name, indicate whether your segment will include (keep) or exclude (remove) the data based upon the rules that you’re going to create. Then select the conversion path type that this segment will be applied to (you can choose from types such as Any Interaction, First Interaction, Conversion Value, and more). After that, select the dimension that you’d like this conversion segment to be integrated with (several dimensions are available, like Source, Medium, Keyword, Campaign, Display URL, and others).

Following that, choose a criteria (Will this segment start with something? Will it end with something? Will it match a regular expression?). Next, select a frequency (Example: did this occur more than 1 time? Did this happen less than 5 times? Most of the time you’ll leave this to say “Greater Than 0 Times”, but you can get creative if you wish).

For the majority of the Custom Conversion Segments you create, you’ll stop here, but there will be times where you’ll want to add conditional “or / and” statements to add inclusion criteria to your new segment.

When you’re finished, hit Save Segment at the bottom of this table. You’ll see your new conversion segment in action, as it compares to all of your conversion traffic (Side Note: 13% of my conversions include keywords containing the word “the”. How insightful is that?).

That pretty much covers our tutorial on Conversion Segments within Multi-Channel Funnels, but keep checking our blog regularly, as we still have another great, in-depth tutorial of another feature built within Multi-Channel Funnels to review.

In the meantime, log-in to your Google Analytics account and start interacting with Conversion Segments today!

Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics, Part 3: Custom Channel Groupings

We continue our tutorial series for the new Multi-Channel Funnels reporting section in Google Analytics today by introducing Custom Channel Groupings.

If you haven’t had a chance to check out our previous two tutorials in this series, carve out some time today and catch up:

- Part 1: The Basics of Multi-Channel Funnels
- Part 2: Conversion Segments

When you’re using Multi-Channel Funnels and are viewing reports like Top Paths and Assisted Conversions, the first column shown in those tables are what Google Analytics is calling “Basic Channel Groupings”. These are your standard source and medium combinations that you’re used to seeing all throughout the Traffic Sources reporting section, but with a streamlined naming convention.

Google Analytics has rules that are built-in to the Multi-Channel Funnels reporting section that will group Traffic Sources as you see in the image above.

Creating Custom Channel Groupings

The basic channel groupings are nice, smart, and user-friendly. But what if you need to see interactions from a new online marketing channel, daily deal / coupon service, or a specific sub-group (like Re-Marketing / Re-Targeting, which is bundled into the Paid Advertising grouping)?

Google Analytics realizes that this is something that power Google Analytics users like yourselves will need to do, so custom channel groupings has been created so that you can do just that.

At the top of any reporting table in Multi-Channel Funnels is a link for Channel Groupings – clicking on this link will bring up a short menu from where you can begin to create a custom channel grouping (We’ll come back to copying a grouping template later).

The custom channel grouping creation wizard will appear directly above this link. First, give your custom channel grouping a name, and then, click on the Add New Rule button to start defining what your channel grouping will show you.

Next, give your rule a name and if you’ve either used Advanced Segments or had the opportunity to read Part 2 of our Multi-Channel Funnel tutorial series, you’ll find the rule creation process very familiar to you (as it’s pretty much like building an Advanced or Conversion Segment). Lastly in this part, choose the color for the label that will appear in reports – this is just like choosing labels for your Gmail account, if you use Google’s Email service. Don’t forget to click on Save Rule after you’re done!

It’s not pictured above, but you are provided the option to add on further rules if you choose, if you want your custom channel grouping to follow strict guidelines. Once you’re finished building your custom channel grouping, click on Save Channel Grouping (pictured below), but note that you’re provided what’s known as a fall-back option, in the event that a value doesn’t match the rules you’ve created. By default, the source/medium combination will be displayed but you can change the dimension.

Here’s a cross-section of what it looks like when you’re viewing your custom channel grouping within Multi-Channel Funnel reports (the image below is zoomed in to focus on the custom channel grouping we just created):

Now, you can obtain deep insights in your custom channel grouping beyond how many conversions it obtained over a period of time. You can evaluate how many assisted conversions it produced and how it interacted with other channel groupings and traffic sources.

You can always edit your custom channel grouping by clicking on the Channel Groupings link that you saw earlier. Or, you can edit the custom channel grouping from the Google Analytics account home (Profiles tab, Assets sub-tab) as pictured below:

Hopefully, we’ve enticed you to start using Multi-Channel Funnels instantly to move beyond traditional conversion tracking. Leave your comments below and tell us what you think!