Thanksgiving is just around the corner and the holiday season is officially here. I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who reads our Analytics and Site Intelligence blog and subscribes to our RSS Feed. You fine folks rock!

There have also been lots and lots of new features in Google AdWords, Google Analytics, and Google Website Optimizer in the past year that I am extremely thankful for. These features have made my job easier, more enjoyable, and have helped a lot of our clients improve their conversion rates, sales revenue, and their bottom lines. Therefore, I’d like to dedicate this post to all of the following features:

1. Conversion Tracking (AdWords):

For years, Google has offered a free conversion tracking script that can be placed on a receipt page, a “thank you” page, or any important page where you ultimately want your AdWords traffic to go to. Recently, the AdWords team has upgraded the Conversion Tracking section within AdWords to include the ability to create multiple conversion actions, new “one-per-click” vs. “many-per-click” metrics, and a verification feature that can detect if the tracking code is properly installed. Way to go AdWords Conversion Tracking team!

2. The Opportunities Tab (AdWords):

The Opportunities tab within the AdWords GUI provides awesome intelligence on how to improve your campaigns. Whether you should be spending more money, using different keywords, or other suggestions, the Opportunities tab can make very good estimates on areas where you could be missing out.  Log-in to your AdWords account and try this amazing feature today!

3. Google Ad Planner (AdWords):

Do you need to see detailed demographic data, domains and sub-domains, keywords, and other traffic statistics for the site or audience that you’re planning to advertise to? Google’s Ad Planner is nothing short of amazing in this department! If display advertising (images, video, rich media) is important for you, you seriously need to sign up for Ad Planner before you do anything else. Any site that you want to run your ads on with Google AdWords should be listed in AdPlanner, as well as the estimated volume of traffic each site receives as well as what types of ads each site supports.

4. Segmenting (AdWords):

Did you know that you can now easily segment your Campaigns, Ad Groups and Keywords in AdWords, much like you can segment any dimension in Google Analytics? This helps you to slice and dice your AdWords campaign data to make better decisions about how you’re spending your hard-earned marketing dollars.

5. Secondary Dimensions and Pivoting (Analytics):

The combination of Secondary Dimensions and Pivoting in any Google Analytics report table makes my job so much easier, faster, and more fun! You can now see up to five separate dimensions all in one report table view, which makes data-mining a far less arduous task.

6. Multiple Custom Variables (Analytics):

No longer are we bound by one label or one bucket for any website visitor. We can now assign visitors multiple labels, thanks to the new Multiple Custom Variables feature in Google Analytics. It takes just a bit of coding to pull it off, but the little bit of technical implementation is by far outweighed by the sheer flexibility and depth that you obtain!

7. Enhanced Mobile Tracking (Analytics)

Mobile analytics with Google Analytics has improved dramatically with this new report section. Found under the Visitors section, site owners can now view the many different mobile devices and mobile carriers that bring visitors to their websites. With a little bit of additional coding, any one using a .mobi site can track their mobile website’s activity in a much smoother and easier way. Oh, by the way, iPods and Nintendo DS Lite’s are counted as mobile devices

8. Intelligence / Custom Alerts (Analytics)

Want to know about significant events that happen on your site, and some guidance as to what to do next? The new Intelligence section is your new best-friend. Google Analytics can now alert you to highly significant events that are happening on your website, who or what are the causes, and what Google Analytics expected to happen (vs. what actually happened). It can also iron your pants and make toast! Well, maybe not yet – perhaps it will be able to soon

You can also create your own custom alerts and have them emailed to you on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Define your own important criteria and observe significant increases or decreases of stuff that’s important to you.

9. Experiment Notes (Website Optimizer)

I’m also very thankful for the wonderful people at Google for their Website Optimizer product. Specifically, I really like Experiment Notes, a brand new feature within the Google Website Optimizer interface. With each new A/B or multivariate experiment, I can write notes about that experiment, such as the start date or important specifics that I need to keep track of, which I can go back to at any time.

10. Over-time charting (Website Optimizer)

Finally, over-time charting in Google Website Optimizer lets me view conversion data plotted daily across a Google Analytics style trending graph, at the top of my experiment report. This lets me observe experiment success / failures over the course of time, and allows me to watch the observed improvements in a cleaner, more graphically-pleasing way.

Those are just some of the many features that I am thankful for. I hope that you have a happy Thanksgiving, a happy “black Friday” and a very happy “cyber Monday”!

Earlier today at eMetrics in Washington, D.C., the Google Analytics team announced some awesome new features that will provide greater reporting capabilities, more flexible customization options, and add an element of insightful intelligence to your report data. How exciting!

Let’s review the newest features of the Google Analytics Product that were announced today as “Powerful. Flexible. Intelligent.”:

1. Expanded Goals - Expanded Goals now allow administrators the ability to add up to 20 Goals per profile, a 500% increase on the previous number of four goals per profile!

2. Site Engagement Goals - Site Engagement Goals now allow you to more robustly measure user-engagement and branding efforts off of your web site. Instead of only being able to define URLs as goals, you can now define the time on site or the number of page views as a goal in Google Analytics.

3. Expanded Mobile Tracking - Google Analytics will now have the ability to track mobile applications built for the iPhone and for the Android platforms. Mobile site owners will be able to install specified tracking code on their mobile site, which will allow them to analyze what actions are taken with a mobile application and what features are used.

4. Advanced Table Filtering - This will be enabled in all standard Google Analytics report tables and will allow users to filter rows based on metric conditions and combinations, just like a user can when creating an Advanced Segment.

5. Unique Visitors – This is a new metric in Google Analytics that will be available when creating a Custom Report. This makes it possible to see how many actual visitors  make up any user-defined segment in a Custom Report.

6. Multiple Custom Variables - This is a highly flexible feature that allows multiple labels to be assigned to each unique visitor. In the past, users could only specify one label via a user-defined segment using the _setVar JavaScript function. Now, users will have the ability to create multiple variables for one unique visitor. These multiple custom variables can now be collected at the page, session, and visitor-level concurrently.

7. Advanced Segment and Custom Report Sharing - Even though this was already announced, this option allows users to share Custom Reports and Advanced Segments with each other via a permanent URL that can be forwarded or emailed to another user.

8. Intelligence Reports - Intelligence Reports will be part of a brand new report section which will feature pre-defined alerts for your Google Analytics account data. This is designed to alert a Google Analytics user to a significant change in data patterns over daily, weekly and monthly periods. This is just a part of the initial release of an algorithmic driven intelligence engine.

9. Custom Alerts - Need to set-up your own alerts with your own parameters? Now you can do just that within the Intelligence Report section of Google Analytics. Define your own set of rules and make your own determinations as to what is significant for your and your web site, and even let Google Analytics email you when an alert happens!

These features are very exciting, but they are only the beginning of greater things to come in 2010. These features are also being pushed out to users over the next few weeks, so check your Google Analytics account frequently (which you do already) and be the first person on your block to use them!

There really isn’t anything better in the world than a properly configured Google Analytics tagging implementation. Well, actually, there are lots of things that are better, like Double Chocolate Chip ice cream and a live rock concert! But at this exact moment, no, there isn’t anything better than the comfort of knowing that your online presence – regardless of how many sub-domains or multiple domains it spans – is tagged perfectly and the cleanest possible data is being funneled into your Google Analytics account.

This is an important topic because there are lots of online storefronts, blogs, microsites, and other web site sections that are hosted on a sub-domain or a completely separate domain that are often forgotten about when it comes time for installing Google Analytics. When tagging isn’t present on a portion of your web site, not only does your bounce rate increase, you also start collecting “dirty data”, including self-referrals in your Traffic Sources section, along with a high than normal amount of direct traffic.

So, how do you implement Google Analytics across sub-domains or across multiple domains? It’s actually quite simple to do, as long as you follow the exact instructions outlined below. Let’s start first with the easy one, sub-domains. We’ll then work our way into the more complex one, multiple domains.

Tracking Google Analytics Across Sub-Domains
Let’s say that your web site’s URL is www.site.com. Let’s also say that your site’s blog is hosted on blog.site.com. Because of the way that the Google Analytics Tracking Code works, installing the code as is from your Google Analytics account will produce a lot of referrals from www.site.com or blog.site.com in your All Traffic Sources report. This means that the visitor’s original referring information (Google, Yahoo, Bing.com, etc…) will be lost if the visitor goes from your main site to your sub-domain site, or vice-versa.

To avoid this headache, simply update your Google Analytics Tracking Code to include the call to _setDomainName, as shown in bold below:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((”https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(”%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(”UA-XXXXXX-X”);
pageTracker._setDomainName(”.site.com”);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>

This modified version of the Google Analytics Tracking Code will need to be installed on both your main site and the sub-domain site. If you have multiple sub-domain sites, then all of those will also need to have this exact modified version as well. Finally, be sure to change “site.com” within the Tracking Code to your site’s domain.

This is relatively easy for you or your webmaster to do.

Tracking Google Analytics Across Multiple Domains
Setting up Google Analytics Tracking Code on multiple domains is a bit tougher than setting GA up on sub-domains, but it’s definitely doable. The following instructions are what you’ll need to follow if you have multiple domains, for example, www.site.com and www.somethingelse.com.

There are a couple of different ways that you can pull this off in documentation online. However, this is our preferred way. First, you’ll need to use calls to _setAllowLinker and _setAllowHash in your Google Analytics Tracking Code on each multiple domain site, like the bolded calls below:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((”https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(”%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(”UA-XXXXXX-X”);
pageTracker._setAllowLinker(”true”);
pageTracker._setAllowHash(false);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>

This is normally done without too much of a problem. The problems come about with this next item, which absolutely must be installed in order for multiple domain tracking to function. On every link to and from each domain, _link must be used, and on every form that takes a user to and from each domain, _linkByPost must be used.

For text links or image links, use _link as a JavaScript onClick event:

onclick=”pageTracker._link(’http://www.site.com/page.html’); return false;”

You’ll need to update “http://www.site.com/page.html” in the above _link function with the full path that a visitor will be taken to on your own web site.

For submit buttons or “add to cart” buttons, use _linkByPost as a JavaScript onSubmit event:

onsubmit=”pageTracker._linkByPost(this)”

It bears repeating that either _link or _linkByPost MUST be used on links to and from each domain. A user may click on a text link that uses _link going from one domain to the next and not affect their tracking, but if they click on a link on the next domain that takes the same user back to the original domain, _link must be present on that link as well, or referring information gets lost and self-referrals start to occur in your Traffic Sources report.

Work closely with your webmaster or IT guru to make sure that _link and _linkByPost are used on every link or form on every domain. It may be tedious, but it’s critical for proper cross-domain tracking with Google Analytics.

We hope that helps you tag your sub-domains and multiple domains properly with Google Analytics. It’s a bit of extra work, but data that is as squeaky clean as possible is a fantastic reward for your efforts!

One of the biggest challenges facing Google AdWords advertisers today is data analysis. Sure, AdWords marketers can determine their ad and keyword quality scores, click-through rates and cost per click bid prices, but what happens to the searcher when they land on the web site, after the click has occurred?

Most AdWords marketers also have a Google Analytics account at their disposal, but a very high percentage of marketers today do not have their Google Analytics account synced with their Google AdWords account. When your AdWords and Analytics accounts are not synced, you could be:

1. Missing out on valuable AdWords data.
2. Seeing a lot of (not set) keywords.
3. Experiencing a very high distortion between your visits and your clicks.
4. Not taking advantage of the “Clicks” tab within the AdWords section of reports with the Traffic Sources section.
5. Mixed or garbled information in your Campaigns, Keywords, or Ad Content reports.

Today, we are going to show you how to sync your Google AdWords and Google Analytics accounts together, so that you can join the party and collect valuable AdWords data within your Google Analytics account.

Step 1: Take charge and become an administrator!
In order for you to sync AdWords and Analytics, the email address that you use to log-in to your AdWords account must also be an administrator of the Google Analytics account. If it is not already an administrator, please get a hold of the person that is the Administrator of your Google Analytics account, and ask them to make you an Administrator. You really shouldn’t do anything else before this happens.

Step 2: Log-In to AdWords and sync your accounts!
After you’ve become a Google Analytics Administrator, it’s time to sync your accounts together.

First, click on the Reporting tab and click on the Google Analytics link, found on the top navigation menu of your AdWords Account:

Once you do that, you should see a screen that looks like the one below, which gives you two options. You can choose to create a new Google Analytics account (no!), or, you can select the second option to link your existing Google Analytics account to your Google AdWords account (yes!). Click on Continue to move on to the next step.

After clicking on Continue, you will reach the final step in the AdWords to Analytics syncing process. Your Google Analytics account’s name should appear in the drop-down menu in the middle of the screen-shot below (if you’re not an Administrator, it won’t appear). Leave “Destination URL Auto-Tagging” checked on, and click on Link my account towards the bottom of the screen.

Congratulations! You’ve just synced your Google AdWords and Google Analytics accounts together. That was fairly easy, was it not?

Step 3: Enjoy The Results!
Now that your Google AdWords and Google Analytics accounts are synced, you can enjoy Campaign, Ad Group, and Keyword data from your AdWords marketing efforts found within the Traffic Sources section of reports. After a couple of days, you’ll also be able to see data populating within the Clicks tab within your AdWords Campaigns report. ROI, Revenue Per Click, and Margin are three new metrics that will appear across the top score-card to give some additional meaning and performance evaluation for your AdWords Campaigns.

You’ll also be able to take advantage of the Keyword Positions report, which will show you keyword click and performance metrics based on the position of each one of your ads, as they appear in a search result.  Also, if you participate in Google TV Ads, you’ll be able to see impression data for your TV Ads, including cost and CPM metrics.

So what are you waiting for? Log-in to your Google AdWords account and sync it to your Google Analytics account today!

Sometimes, less is more. Sometimes, fewer words can speak at a higher volume than lots of words. Sometimes, a simple, neat, and easy to read report can have a greater effect than a report filled with endless columns and rows of data. This is the case with the Top Landing Pages report in Google Analytics.

Tucked away quietly in the middle of the Content section of your Google Analytics profile, the Top Landing Pages report won’t dazzle you with an AJAX-based, “do-it-yourself” module like the Custom Advanced Segments area or fancy click-data on top of your web site like the Site Overlay report. In fact, the Top Landing Pages report has only three quantitative columns – most reports start out with at least five or six.

The report even has an evil twin – the Top Exit Pages report, which for the few folks who discover Top Landing Pages, can confound the two reports and even go as far as thinking that one is the continuation of the other (ouch!).

So what is it about Top Landing Pages that is so valuable, and such a hidden gem? Two words: Bounce Rate. The sole purpose of the Top Landing Pages report is  to compare Bounce Rates against the entry pages that your visitors used to reach your web site. And, as we all know, Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits to your web site. High bounce rates are bad, because they suggest that your Landing Pages are either broken, unattractive, or did not meet visitor expectations. Low bounce rates are very good, because they suggest that your Landing Page content was interesting and persuasive enough to entice a visitor to go to another one of your site pages.

When you bring up the Top Landing Pages report, you’ll immediately see your top 10 Landing Pages (or, entry points) of your web site, and three metrics for each Landing Page: Entrances, Bounces, and Bounce Rate. You can use the “Rows” drop-down at the bottom-right of your report table to see more Landing Pages if you choose, and the “Filter” tool on the bottom-left of your report table to include or exclude certain pages from the report.

I mentioned two paragraphs ago that a high bounce rate is bad, and a low bounce rate is good. However, I won’t give you a percentage and say whether or not that figure is good or bad. A Bounce Rate of 35% may be very high for your web site, or it may be very low, which depends on several factors, such as visitor demographics and your web site’s industry vertical. Comparing your Bounce Rate against a static number will not give you an accurate measure of performance. However, Comparing your Bounce Rate against your site’s average will allow you to provide a backdrop of context for each individual Landing Page, as shown in the following image, with the Comparison to Site Average view enabled:

After you’ve used Top Landing Pages for your own web site, determine which pages are in need of some optimization work. Is a Landing Page that you’re using for your pay per click campaigns suffering from a really high bounce rate? Now would be the time to possibly re-write that page’s content, make it more conversion-oriented, or fix any technical errors that may be present. Is one of your category-level pages a rock-star with a minuscule bounce rate? You may want to give Kudos to your SEO team, as their copywriting and keyword-matching optimization work is paying off.

Now that the best-kept Google Analytics secret has been exposed, add this report to your dashboard, or set-up a scheduled email report so that you can stay ahead of the curve and begin lowering those Bounce Rates!