Today on the Analytics & Site Intelligence blog, I’d like to introduce a brand new feature that may change the way you think about your report data.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever sorted by the Bounce Rate column within your Google Analytics account, only to be disappointed with the sheer number of single visit bounce rates at 100%! I know I have. Additionally, have you ever  re-sorted that Bounce Rate column (clicked on the column heading a second time) and saw single visit bounce rates at 0%? How useful was that information?

Last week, the Google Analytics team introduced Weighted Sort, which applies statistical significance to column sorting. Now, when you sort your report table by Bounce Rate (or, any other computed metric, like Goal Conversion rate, Ecommerce Conversion Rate, or %New Visits), you will see a new check box that will appear above the data columns labeled Weighted Sort. When this check box is clicked, your data will no longer be sorted by Bounce Rate (or your computed metric of choice) – your data will now be sorted by its rank, or, its weight (hence the name!)

Let me show you what I mean, visually. First, the image directly below this sentence shows you a cross-section of the All Traffic Sources report, within the Traffic Sources section in Google Analytics. Notice that – by default – the report is sorted in descending order by Visits (symbolized by the downward-pointing arrow):

Instead of viewing my All Traffic Sources report sorted by visits, I want to view the report sorted by Bounce Rate. So in this second image, I have clicked on the Bounce Rate column heading:

As expected, I am seeing 100% Bounce Rate traffic sources with a few visits listed for each – which traditionally has not been very helpful. However, with the new Weighted Sort check box (as shown at the top of the image above), I can tell Google Analytics to disregard the traditional sorting method and apply statistical significance to give me a better read out of how my traffic sources are performing. Now, in the next image, check out the results:

Even though some traffic sources with higher bounce rates are listed higher up within the report table now than other traffic sources, Google Analytics takes the volume of traffic (visits) into consideration with Weighted Sort. You’ll need to force yourself into the habit of looking at the far left of the report table, where the rows are numbered, to know where each item on your report ranks when you use weighted sort. Look at the very left of this last image and you’ll see each row numbered from 1 to however many rows of data your report contains:

Even though I used the All Traffic Sources report as my example for this blog post, you can use virtually any report in Google Analytics and enable Weighted Sort on it (for example, the Keywords report). Weighted Sort should give you a much better perspective as to how your data ranks from a statistical standpoint than the previous column sorting / ranking method that Google Analytics traditionally used.

Google Analytics’ new Weighted Sort feature should help take even more  guesswork out of your day-to-day analysis equation – who doesn’t want that?

We truly, madly, deeply love having multiple options to choose from here at MoreVisibility. So when my colleague Emily MacNair forwarded me a recent post on the Google Webmaster Tools blog about a shiny new option for website owners to verify their websites, my Friday was made!

Website owners can now verify their websites using the new “async” Google Analytics Tracking Code, which makes a website owner’s life a lot easier.

Previous to this announcement, a website owner would need to add a meta tag to their site’s source code, upload an HTML verification file, or add a DNS record to verify a website with Google Webmaster Tools. Now, if the email address that’s used to log-in to Google Webmaster Tools has Administrative Access to a Google Analytics account – AND – the website is using the new “async” Google Analytics Tracking Code, a website can be verified without code-bloating meta tags, extra HTML files or DNS entries.

If you’re an administrator on your Google Analytics account and if you’re using the new “async” code, then all you have to do is click on Verify as shown in the image above.

Thanks to the Google Webmaster Tools team, you now have one additional reason to update to the new “async” Google Analytics tracking code, other than the new code being lighter, faster, and technologically superior to the previous code models.

Go and upgrade today – and verify your website while you’re at it .

Wikipedia defines attribution as a “journalistic practice of attributing information to its source.”  In analytics, it’s the struggle to understand which of your marketing efforts truly have a positive effect of your top and bottom lines.

It seems simple enough, you send an e-mail or run a PPC campaign and you get a sale.  Your web analytics platform tells you that you sold 7 widgets in one transaction and the visitor who made the purchase came from a Bing PPC campaign that was fired by the keyword “blue widgets”.   That sounds simple enough:  A click in Bing led to a $100 sale.  Not bad.

In reality, most sites do not have easy, one-visit conversions. Let’s dig deeper.  Using your web analytics tool, you are able to see that this new customer has come to your site five times over the last month.  With five touch points to the site; should Bing really get all the credit?

In Google Analytics, the last click that led to the sale gets full credit and this is known as last-click attribution.  If you don’t consider this truth, you are doomed to lower quality decisions regarding your marketing.

In Google analytics, there are a couple of options to help you get to more meaningful data:

1. You can modify the Google Analytics Tracking Code to, by default; give full credit to the first touch point with your site. (GATC is the snippet of code that is placed on every page of your site.)
2. You could use custom variables and unique landing pages for each marketing effort.

The first option may work if you are only interested in the first way someone became aware of your site and you have a short sales cycle.  If, on the other hand, you have a long sales cycle and many marketing channels, this method can be less effective.  For example:  If you use this method, someone that visited your site 6 months ago via Twitter and forgot that you existed;  but then  made a purchase after an organic search would have the value of the transaction attributed to Twitter and not your SEO efforts.

Using custom variables and unique landing pages allows you to “tag” visitors as they respond to your marketing.  It’s not perfect, but it can help you develop a better picture of what’s generating revenue for your business.  Let’s revisit our example from above, where on the fifth visit someone made a purchase via Bing PPC.  Remember that we attributed the sale to Bing.

If you used custom variables and unique landing pages, the picture could look something like this:

Visit 1 was from a display ad via the Google Display Network

Visit 2 was from Google PPC keyword “widgets”

Visit 3 was from your re-marketing campaign on the Google Display Network

Visit 4 was from Facebook

Visit 5 was the Bing PPC ad for “blue widgets”

So what you initially thought was a $100 sale on a $4 keyword in Bing has become a much more robust picture of how your multi-channel approach is paying off.  You can decide for yourself how much weight or credit each channel should receive.  Regardless,  you now have a much better understanding of how your marketing is performing and can make better decisions on which channels are deserving of your marketing spend.

We here at the Analytics & Site Intelligence blog at MoreVisibility don’t spend as much time as we should talking about pay-per-click. After all, pay-per-click advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry that’s only getting larger by the click.

Recently, Google AdWords announced a new keyword targeting option for advertisers globally called Modified Broad Match; this announcement coming on the heels of a re-branding effort for their Content Network, which is now called the Google Display Network.

With modified broad match, advertisers can further refine their keyword search audience without having to use phrase or exact match. Regular broad match (or, non-modified broad match) is still the keyword matching option that will allow advertisers to cast the widest possible net on Google search and their partners. Advertisers bidding on a keyword like “brown shoes” using regular broad match will have their ads appear for search queries such as “formal dress shoes”, “men’s brown shoes”, “wingtip shoes for men”, and many other variations. Advertisers who choose to use modified broad match will allow themselves the opportunity to capture misspellings while blocking out possibly irrelevant search queries by inserting a plus-sign symbol in front of every word in the search term the advertiser bids for.

If you have a large number of keywords in your campaigns, inserting a plus-sign symbol in front of every word of every search term would be a monumentally boring and nightmarish task to complete. Since this isn’t your first rodeo, you already know that using Google AdWords Editor saves you time, energy, and lets you make changes across multiple campaigns or ad groups offline without having to toggle between campaigns like you have to do on the live web interface. It’s also a great way to make sweeping changes to your keyword match types, specifically, from broad match to modified broad match.

To show you an example, let’s say that you wanted to make the switch from broad to modified broad, and you wanted to use a plus-sign symbol in front of every word within all of your keywords. First, you’d want to log-in to open AdWords Editor and download recent changes (ALWAYS download recent changes before doing anything in AdWords Editor). Next, click on the keywords tab and highlight all of the keywords using the CTRL + A function on your keyboard.

Next, click on the link at the bottom of the AdWords Editor interface that reads Replace text. This will create a pop-up window like the one in the image below. You’ll want to find the space character (one hit on your keyboard’s space bar) in keywords, and replace it with a space and the plus-sign symbol. Click on Find Matches to update your keywords.

What you should see after you click on Find matches is plus-sign symbols between each word of your keyword. However, you may wonder what you should do about one-word keywords and the first word of every keyword, since those won’t have plus-signs in front of them. For all of those instances (and to fully change all keywords from broad match to modified broad match), click on the Append text link, which is right next to the Replace text link on the bottom of the interface. Then, do what I did in the following image (select “Keywords” and enter in the plus-sign symbol underneath it, while ensuring that you’ve selected Before existing text) and you’ll be good to go:

Of course, don’t forget to click on Post Changes while making sure you select All Campaigns when you’re finished in order to post your changes live to Google AdWords. You wouldn’t want your quick, efficient work to stay offline, would you?

This chart, from the Google AdWords Blog Inside AdWords, visually explains how modified broad match differs from the other match types that are currently available.

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!