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”!

While it’s great that so many folks are diving head-first into the ocean of analytics, it’s very important to understand that one individual cannot do it alone. Everyone – even one man / one woman shows – needs a village…a community of individuals that can support, educate, and collaborate with one another to install, upload, and subsequently measure and take meaningful, useful insights from their analytics data.

Each person needs to rely upon any one (if not all) of the following types of people to truly achieve Web Analytics success:

1. The Web Analytics “Champion”
Each organization needs that one person who stands proud and champions the cause to their colleagues. This person takes command and learns everything possible about Web Analytics, and can eat and drink metrics and reports for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This person can calculate search campaign ROI and Average Order Value figures in their sleep. He / She is the quarterback / point guard / captain of the team.

2. A Colleague who Shares the Vision
Forging a relationship with a co-worker who can get as excited and enthusiastic about Web Analytics as the “Web Analytics Champion” is key to promoting a culture of data insights throughout your organization. It becomes contagious to the rest of the company when they see that others are being positively influenced by Web Analytics, and they’ll want to be a part of it.

3. A Friend in Need is a Friend in IT
No matter what type of Web Analytics program you choose to run with, a technical / IT person is going to be necessary at one point or another. IT folks can help you upload any necessary scripts, code your website’s pages, manage APIs, parse server log-files, fix and repair bugs, and anything else needed for Web Analytics success. Making friend(s) in the IT department is a crucial, often overlooked step.

4. Don’t Forget the Marketers
At the end of the day, the purpose of Web Analytics is to understand the behavior and actions of your website’s visitors. Marketing / advertisement is what drives traffic to a website, be it a pay-per-click ad or a couple of months of hard-nosed SEO optimization work. The marketing department is going to need reports and statistics from Web Analytics to be able to refine their efforts, and evaluate which are working and profitable, which ones are wastes of money, and which ones have potential.

5. Sell, Sell, Sell!
Sometimes, the concepts and the philosophy of Web Analytics are hard to explain throughout an organization – anyone who has ever heard “Why Should I Spend Any Time with This?” will understand. This is a great opportunity to get a sales rep, or even the VP of Sales on board with Web Analytics. They can probably share with you some persuasive techniques that can be used to attract interest.

6. Who’s The Boss?
Not Tony Danza – unless he IS your boss. The Senior VP, Chief Technical Officer, Executive Vice-President, or perhaps the CEO themselves should be on board the Web Analytics gravy train. This is, understandably, a vital part in the ultimate success of building a culture of Web Analytics within your company – important colleagues or co-workers who were on the fence before may be strongly persuaded to jump on the bandwagon if a supervisor, partner, or even the owner supports the efforts.

In a lot of situations, people do not have the ability to take the reigns and create this prosperous culture of finding actionable insights. They work alone, in a small group, or in large companies where teams are spread across several offices, making building a community near impossible. Fortunately for us, MoreVisibility is that culture of Web Analytics. We are a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant, a Google AdWords Qualified Company, and have an entire organization of colleagues who champion the cause for Web Analytics.

What exactly is “Direct Traffic”?

Direct traffic is traffic that comes to you “directly”, without the help of an organic, referral, or cost-per-click source. Folks who type in your website’s URL manually into their browser’s address bar, or folks who copy / paste your URL into the address bar are counted by Google Analytics (and most other Web Analytics platform) as “direct”.

What else can be counted as “direct” traffic?

If someone visited your website by manually typing or copy / pasting your URL into their address bar, and they bookmark your site and visit you again from that bookmark, they will be counted as “direct”.  This is the good kind of direct traffic. The bad kind of direct traffic – the kind that can be destroying and polluting this valuable segment – can be caused by redirects, improper / incorrect tagging set-up, and things like banners and email campaigns that are not tagged for Google Analytics (or your favorite WA program).

How do I fix these issues?

It depends on the complexity and severity of your situation, but there is no reason why you can’t collect proper, unpolluted direct traffic data. If you are doing banner advertising or email blasts, ensure that every single link embedded within the email or every destination URL of your banners is tagged for analytics. Google Analytics offers a URL Tool Builder page that can quickly set this up for you for free.

If your site is redirecting visitors, ensure that all pages have the necessary tracking code present (even on the redirecting page itself). However, if at all possible, try to slow down the redirect, so that the tracking codes have time to fire off.

If your site spans multiple domains, please ensure that both sites and all links to and from each site are properly set-up, according to your vendor’s specifications on tracking 3rd party websites. Any analytics program will be able to do this – visit the help section of your site or contact your account rep for assistance.

It bears repeating that there should be NO REASON why your direct traffic should be a big bucket of traffic from lots of different types of sources that couldn’t be tagged properly or coded correctly. Ask your email vendor / media manager / press release guru to help you with tagging / coding issues (and if they give you any grief, tell them I said it was very important ).

Everything is tagged and coded properly, and my direct traffic is only counting what it’s supposed to count. What next?

For the most part, your direct traffic will remain fairly steady from month to month, with the occasional lift or dip here and there. Hopefully, over the long haul, your direct traffic will have increased, as your website becomes more and more popular over time. However, if you do any type of offline advertising (TV, Radio, Print), you can use the direct traffic segment to evaluate the success / failure of your offline efforts. Did you just run a commercial on prime-time network TV featuring your website’s URL? Check your analytics data the next morning and you’ll probably find a nice spike in direct traffic. The same thing happens when your monthly catalog or special offer gets delivered to your customer’s mail boxes. Collect a few of these spikes from offline efforts and in a couple of months you may be able to gauge the pulse of your offline audience and how they respond to what you are sending them / showing them.

Your direct traffic can also increase if your latest press release just got sent out, or you just turned up the dial on your Google AdWords campaign – not everyone clicks on a link, sometimes, they copy / paste it, which will count them as direct, despite your proper implementation. For this small group of copy / pasters out there, there really isn’t anything you can do, but you should be confident enough with your clean data to still obtain great insights anyway.

Direct traffic doesn’t have to be a big pile of unorganized and useless data. It can be exactly what you thought it was, as long as you put in the work to make it happen.

Bounce Rate

Interestingly, Bounce Rate is one of the only metrics in Web Analytics that we want less of. We want lower bounce rates, not higher, and fewer bounces, not more. A question I get asked at least three times a week by clients and co-workers alike is “How do we lower our Bounce Rate?” There are a lot of things that you can do, but there are only so many options that have proven to be effective over time. Today, let me share with you five different things that you can do – today – to start decreasing your bounce rate,  by keeping your website’s visitors engaged with your website.

1. A “Higher” Call-To-Action
Have you ever heard the expression “Out of Sight, Out of Mind“? A persuasive and engaging call-to-action that is very low on a page, say, below the fold of a page, can cause visitors to lose focus and get distracted by your content / video / latest web 2.0 toy, which may cause the visitor to hit the back button or close their browser before visiting the next page on your site. No matter how nice of a call-to-action you have and no matter how attractive the offer or pitch may be, it needs to be highly visible to your website’s audience so that they can react (positively) to it and click on it, thereby lower the number of folks who bounce off of the page.

2. A Sync with your Ads and your Landing Pages
No, I’m not talking about N’Sync – I’m talking about a strong connection between the ads and the messaging you are using with the page that you are directing all of your future visitors to go to. One of the biggest factors that could be driving your Bounce Rates higher and higher is a mixed message that you are sending to your potential visitors. For example, if your ad copy says “15% Off!”, you need to make sure that “15% Off!” is the very first thing that a visitor sees when they hit your website. If you have “multiple sizes and colors available”, direct the visitor to a page where they can choose their favorite color and the right size. Using a promo code in your ad? Create a unique landing page and have the promo code appear right away on the page, so that visitors will feel the connection between your marketing message and what’s really happening on the website.

3. Improper Tagging on your Website Pages
A silent but very deadly killer, untagged pages of your website can only do your website harm. When some pages are missing the Google Analytics Tracking Code, visitors reaching those pages will have their referral cookie updated, thereby resetting information like “google / organic”, the campaign, and the keyword they used to reach you. At all times, when uploading a new page or section to your site, stop and make sure that the Google Analytics Tracking Code is present on your new page(s) first before uploading. This will save you a lot of head-scratching, unnecessary report ugliness, and will decrease your Bounce Rate, all at the same time!

4. Writing for your audience
Khrysti / SEO Team – I haven’t forgotten about you, because I am still writing “Content Is King!” That statement definitely translates to the Analytics side of things, and helps reduce your Bounce Rate. Use a combination of Google Insights for Search, Google Ad Planner and Google Trends for Websites to get an idea of the type of traffic that your website can receive, as well as valuable demographic information which could represent your future audience. Once you are comfortable with the type of audience and volume you expect to receive, write your website’s content appropriately and specifically targeted, so that visitors will feel a connection with what you’re saying. To use an exaggerated example, you wouldn’t want to talk about the fashion stylings of the cast of “The Hills” if your website sells motorcycle insurance (This, unfortunately, happens a lot on the web and it leads to a high number of bounces).

5. Testing, Testing, 1…2…3!
Finally, it’s essential that you incorporate some program of testing and experimentation on your website on a weekly or monthly basis. Each and every week (or few weeks), you should think about some element of your website or some element of an advertisement that you’ll want to experiment with, to see which version is the more profitable and successful one. Google Website Optimizer is a fantastic product where you can easily create as many experiments as you’d like, and see clear results in no time. You can also create a Website Optimizer experiment from start to finish in well under 10 minutes, which means you won’t have to be bogged down with hours of set-up and design time. Testing and experimentation with Google Website Optimizer is one of the best ways to decrease your Bounce Rate over the long-run, while sky-rocketing your conversion rates at the same time!

So there you have it – 5 great things that you can do today to start lowering your Bounce Rate, keeping your website’s visitors engaged, focused, and happy with you!

While it is illegal to use “black hat” techniques to keep tabs on your competition (such as using “spy ware” type software programs), keeping your eyes and ears open to what your competitors are doing is a critical part of being successful online. Knowing what your opponents are up to can give you great ideas and inspiration for your own website or marketing efforts. It can (and should) also serve as an alert or warning system as to what not to do online, which can be equally as important for you.

Here are just some of the many different things you can do to stay on top of your competitor’s efforts:

1. Visit their website!
Pretty simple, right? If you know the URL of your competitor’s websites, check it out to see what they have going on. Pay close attention to how they market to their potential customer base, the language they use, and the type of sales angle that they incorporate. Be observant of the layout of their website, color scheme, navigation, and – of course – products and services offered.

2. Search for them online
See how successful (or how futile) their online marketing efforts are by searching for their brand name. You don’t have to click on their ads or organic search results – just look them up on Google and Yahoo a few times. Here, you’ll want to take note of how aggressive /  passive their marketing language is, and what incentives / discounts / promotions they are offering.

3. Sign up for their newsletter / monthly email alerts / RSS Feeds
This is an excellent way to learn “what’s hot” with you business adversaries. Normally, your competitors will promote the latest and greatest product or service to their email database, including any speaking engagements or other important announcements that they have. Learn how they speak to their database and what re-marketing efforts they are using, and consider similar methods for your own Email marketing efforts (if they are using good methods).

4. Check out their social media / blog / viral marketing programs
Are your competitors present in Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter? Do you know what StumbleUpon and Digg are? When was your competitor’s last blog post? If your competition isn’t focusing on any of these newer mediums, then this is an excellent opportunity to gain ground and establish a presence before they catch on. If they are already engaged in Social Media efforts, consider subscribing to their blog, their RSS feed, and “follow” or “connect” with them. They will most likely speak to their audience much differently in these mediums than they will on their website or newsletter – take note of what they are saying and doing here.

5. Do your competitors advertise / market offline?
Have you seen your competitor’s brand and products in a magazine or newspaper? Are they running a late-night infomercial or day-time TV ad? Have you heard their phone number repeated 9 times in a 30 second radio spot on your drive home from work? You may not be able to afford these mediums as they are FAR more expensive than pay-per-click advertising, but it’s good to pay attention to their offline messaging – visit their site the next time you’re in front of your computer and see if there is a connection between the ad that you read or heard and their website.

6. Look at your Referring Sites / Hostname / Domain Name Reports
Your analytics package should be able to tell you what websites have been sending you traffic, and, what domains are delivering you traffic. This is a great way to tell if your competitors are checking you out. Fight the urge to block out or exclude this traffic from appearing in your reports – keep this valuable data in your analytics package. If your competitors are really checking you out, chances are that you are doing something that has caught their attention, and you are most likely going down the right path.

7. Enable Data Sharing / Benchmarking (with Google Analytics)
Google Analytics allows for you to compare your basic website’s metrics against the averages of websites that are a similar size to yours. This is available within the Visitors >> Benchmarking report. The catch: You must anonymously share your data with Google and other services, such as AdWords, to be able to have access to this section. The benefits of knowing how you stack up against websites in your industry – and across every available industry in this section – far outweigh the risk of anonymously sharing your data with Google (keep in mind they already have your website data when you use Google Analytics, so it’s not that much of a leap of faith to enable Data Sharing in your Google Analytics account).

8. Use online research tools like Google’s Insight for Search!
Finally, get a grip on historical and current trends of keywords and key phrases with free programs like Google Trends for Websites and Google Insights for Search. You can perform searches for your competitor’s brand names and products, and you’ll be able to gauge the level of interest at global, national, and regional levels. If there are terms or key phrases gaining popularity that your competitors are using, you may want to consider jumping on those while they’re hot.

Checking out what your competition is doing can help guide your own efforts, as you learn what to do and what not to do. However, always keep in mind to play fair and behave in an ethical fashion – NEVER slander, defame, or bad-mouth your competitors on your website, your blog, or on your MySpace page. Don’t click on their pay-per-click ads, never subscribe their contact or info email to spam mailings, and refrain from posting negative reviews of their YouTube videos or their Local Submission listings.

Have a great 2009!!!

• Full suites of reporting options
• Colorful, easy-to-use graphics and reporting interfaces
• Data that is “good enough” for any marketer or decision-maker to use
• Fast and almost always reliable data

But with script-based web analytics – and like anything in life, really – there are pros and cons, or, the good and the bad. Unfortunately, not every visitor can be tracked with script-based web analytics programs. Some individuals purposely configure their browser settings to block web analytics tools from tracking and collecting data; others have no idea that their browser settings are configured in a fashion that would block or interfere with the data collection process. Most website visitors using mobile phones simply do not have the technical capabilities to be tracked by web analytics programs.

What this means is that tag-based web analytics solutions can only track visitors that allow themselves to be tracked. There are three separate elements that users can restrict on their browser of choice, rendering script-based analytics programs completely helpless. Users can block or restrict images, JavaScript, and cookies from loading or processing – blocking or restricting any one of these means “No Soup For You!” I call these elements the “Three Evils of Analytics Tracking” (Sounds scary, doesn’t it?).

Images
A part of how web analytics programs (like Google Analytics) operate is by requesting a 1×1 invisible GIF image to the Google Analytics servers for storing and processing the data it has just collected. If a browser does not have images enabled for whatever reason, this request cannot be satisfied, and data – although collected – cannot be sent to Google Analytics for processing, hence, no data in reports.

This doesn’t affect too many folks, as almost everyone has their browsers set to load images, and only a very small percentage of the population even knows how to do this in the first place. However, this is a major problem when tracking things like Email Open Rates, which in most (if not all) cases are handled by a request for a 1×1 clear pixel GIF image to the necessary server. If a person does not click on “Download Images”, that person is not able to be tracked.

JavaScript
The main logic behind all tag-based web analytics programs is JavaScript. JavaScript is easy and fast to implement, and it’s the type of web analytics tracking solution that makes the most overall sense across the board. It is with a few lines of JavaScript code that a website can set cookies on a person’s computer, collect data, and send that data to the appropriate processing server, be it an in-house server or a data warehouse of some kind. However, not all that glitters is gold. If users have JavaScript disabled, they cannot be tracked – it is that simple.

Luckily, not many folks disable JavaScript, as it is such a commonly used language, present on almost every website out there. However, a very small percentage of folks do block JavaScript, which is unfortunate for anyone involved with Web Analytics. This really affects mobile phone users in a big way – since the browsers on a lot of mobile phone platforms cannot execute or understand JavaScript, they cannot be tracked by default. The only thing that anyone can do about this is to hope that soon enough, all mobile phones will be equipped with a JavaScript-executing browser.

Cookies
Cookies are very small files that get set by websites on a person’s computer. These small files collect information pertaining to their activity on a website: when they entered the site, when they left the site, where they came from, what source of traffic brought the person there, how many times a person has visited the site, and so on. Cookies come in many different shapes and sizes, life spans, and security levels, but if any of them are blocked or disabled by users on their favorite browser, web analytics programs cannot store or collect data about these individuals.

Unlike Images and JavaScript, Cookie “management” is a very big concern, and it’s the biggest evil of the three. Some people block only specific cookies from specific sites. Some people block all cookies, regardless of where they originate from. Others have daily, weekly, or every first of the month cookie deletion parties on their personal computers, where they wipe off every cookie imaginable. All of these actions hurt tag-based web analytics programs, un-purifying data and distorting figures. This affects a very sizeable portion of the population – some independent reports have this figure at 3 or 4% of all internet users, while other reports have this figure in the high teens / low 20′s.

So how do I know that my data is “good”? Should I be worried about this?

This shouldn’t be something that you lose sleep over, but you definitely need to be aware. If data quality is something that your organization simply cannot live without, tag-based web analytics solutions are going to give you a lot of headaches – you want to consider using log-file parsing programs or packet-sniffing programs, although there aren’t too many of those programs available anymore. You may also want to consider using raw server log information to help.

If tracking every single person that visits your website is not the most important thing – that is, you can live with being a few percentage points “off”, and a little margin of error, then you really have nothing to worry about. Web analytics programs weren’t designed to collect the exact number of hits or queries like your server is configured for – web analytics programs were designed to give you valuable insights about your website’s performance, which can effectively be accomplished with the percentage of data that they can collect for most companies.