The Google Analytics Beta: Improving Profits through Web Site Analytics

The Google Analytics Beta: Improving Profits through Web

Site Analytics

by Ross W. Lambert, The Midnight Marketer

Web site analytics, for those who might not be familiar with

the term, is the tracking of various performance metrics

for a given web site. The metrics themselves can range from

the simple (and relatively useless) count of " hits", i.e.

requests for a given resource such as a single web page,

image file, etc., to the measure of far more complex

interactions. These complicated interactions can be totally

arbitrary; for example, you might want to know the number of

orders from visitors who were referred by search engines

and scrolled at least halfway down a long sales page.

That assumes, of course, that you can figure out how to

configure all that tracking, interpret the results and

afford the monthly fees for the providers of the service.

The cost issue is apparently solved: Google Analytics

(http://google.com/analytics) is currently free in its beta

version, and early indications are that it will remain so.

However, a word of caution is in order: The Terms of Service

referenced on the Google Analytics home page seems to

indicate that Google can and will make use of your site's

data, at least in aggregate form (that is, mixed in with

everybody else).

In many minds Google is starting to become a Big

Brother-like presence on the web, hence its motives are

suspect pretty much by definition. Personally, I consider my

site's aggregate data a fair trade for the value I will

extract from their software, but you will have to make up

your own mind. If you're not bothered by Google knowing as

much about your web site as you do, then Google Analytics

looks very promising. It is a smart, easy-to-use

implementation that hits the sweet spot of web analytics.

The Sweet Spot: Easy Yet Powerful

The sweet spot I'm referring to is really the point where

most of us live. We don't have the technical know-how to

configure the most complicated tracking scenarios and even

if we could, we don't have the analytical savvy to make any

sense of the data. Google has found the sweet spot by making

tracking configuration quite easy, and providing pre-cooked

role-based reports that provide lots of information you may

not have even realized was readily available. In short, you

can get an awful lot of strategic data for very little

effort.

Configuration

Let's walk through setting up a simple and common scenario:

We want to know how well our sales letter is converting web

site visitors to customers. Where Google Analytics shines is

how much valuable data it automatically gleans from such a

simple test.

Google calls a tracking scenario a "profile". Although you

can include URLs from many web sites in a single profile, it

is easiest if you organize things such that a profile is

fundamentally the same as a web site.

As part of setting up your profile, you provide the URLs of

all the pages for which you want data. Google then provides

you with a JavaScript snippet to include on each page. The

snippet is self-contained and requires no editing; it looks

like this:

_uacct = "xx-yyyyyyy-zz";

urchinTracker();

You can put the snippet anywhere inside the tags of

your web pages.

Next, you want to specify a "goal". The goal in our case is

sales; we know that the goal has been achieved when the

customer reaches our "thank you" page, which we send them to

immediately following a purchase. Therefore the URL

associated with the goal is that of our thank you page. More

sophisticated goals can involve defining a "funnel" of

multiple pages; this can be extraordinarily useful in

identifying a weak spot in a more complicated sales process.

At this point our setup is finished! You then need to just

let your site run and accumulate statistics for at least 24

hours.

Reports

When you return and select View Reports, you will see an

amazing array of statistics at your disposal. The first

thing you'll notice is a pop-down menu with several roles,

namely Executive, Marketer, and Webmaster. Each role has a

suite of pre-cooked reports likely to be of interest to

someone in that role.

We'll focus on the Marketer role; when you choose this

option you'll see the Marketing Overview by default. It

includes four charts:

- A line graph showing raw page views over time

- A pie chart showing the proportion of returning versus new

visitors

- A world map showing the geographic distribution

of visitors

- A pie chart showing the visitor counts based on the referrer,

i.e. Google, Blogger.com (for my blog),

etc.

The Overview is general data useful for knowing the overall

populatiry of your site and where your visitors are coming

from.

The Marketing Summary report is a numerical chart that shows

the top five referrers, the top five keywords used by

searchers, and the top five campaigns. A campaign is

indicated by a code that you attach to a URL. Even so, by

default you get several campaign totals. These default

campaigns are:

- Organic: Indicates visitors referred by an unpaid search

engine listing.

- Referral: Indicates visitors referred by links which were

not tagged with any campaign variables.

- Not set: Indicates visitors referred by links which were

tagged with campaign variables but for which the campaign

variable was not set.

- Direct: Indicates visitors whotyped the URL directly into

the browser.

The next report of interest is Overall Keyword Conversion.

Since we have indicated a goal of "sales" and linked it to

our thank you page, the Overall Keyword Conversion report is

able to tell you which search engine keywords result in the

most sales. This is a really useful and potentially

profitable report.

The Campaign Conversion report shows which campaigns are

creating the most sales and the Conversion Summary produces

total visits and total goal percentages (i.e the number of

visitors that achieved each goal).

Finally, the Entrance Bounce Rate is an interesting report

that also has valuable data, even in our simple scenario: It

provides the list of pages for which customers land and

then leave right away. For some pages, our product download

page for example, we expect a 100% bounce rate. For others

it can illustrate a weak or problematic page.

Google Analytics provides an astonishing amount of data for

very little effort—and no cost (so far, anyway). Although

there a few advanced reports missing from its arsenal, it

makes the bulk of the web site measurement you'll want to do

very easy indeed.

Ross Lambert is The Midnight Marketer and the founder of

MidnightMarketer.com, an online community of internet

marketers (http://midnightmarketer.com). He is also the

author of Sonic Page Blaster (http://spbsavestime.com) and

Ross's Guide to the Masters of Marketing

(http://saleslettergenius.com).

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