Goals in Google Analytics

The changes Google have made to the way goals work in Analytics could add a lot to your understanding of your site and the way it works for your customers.

Goals are very important in web analytics. The basic purpose of analytics is to help you identify which parts of your site are working, and which aren't. How you define 'working' is where goals come in.

On an e-commerce site, it's tempting to conclude that the site is working if people are buying your products. Actual monetary transactions like these should always be tracked in the e-commerce section of GA. But there's more to your business than just selling, right? You want customers to engage with your site, and build up some sort of relationship with it, so that - for example - you can be confident that a new and cheaper competitor will have a hard time pulling the rug from under you.

That's why the new types of goals just introduced in Google Analytics are so useful. As well as goals that involve hitting a certain page (like a newsletter signup), you can now set up goals that require the user to spend a certain amount of time on the site, or to view a certain number of pages.

Goals like this, that measure engagement rather than just a particular action, are exactly what the goals section of GA has always been useful for - and this new functionality will allow us all to get a much truer and more comprehensive understanding of our users' behaviour.

If you want to take advantage of the new goal types - as well as Analytics Intelligence, Multiple Custom Variables, or any of the other new features recently added to Google Analytics - get in touch through our website, and we'll get straight back to you.

What is a Google Authorised Consultant?

Google provide Google Analytics and Google Website Optimiser for free. It makes sense for them to do that, because these two applications make websites better for users, which makes advertising through AdWords more valuable, which makes Google money.

However, it doesn't make sense for them to provide in-depth support for these applications. To do it right, they'd have to engage deeply with each client, understand their business's specific needs and challenges, and maintain a relationship with each client over time - and all this over dozens of countries and time zones.

Instead, what Google do is to certify and authorise private companies all over the world to provide support for these products on their behalf. As well as enabling all the aspects of support described above, this allows there to be specialists in different industries and types of website, and support companies of all different sizes, so that users of Google Analytics and Google Website Optimiser can find the right fit for their business.

Getting started guide for Google Analytics

Google have launched an updated version of the getting started guide for Google Analytics. For those that feel they have the sufficient know how and time to implement Google Analytics on their site (and don't already? shame on you) visit the following link Getting Started with Google Analytics. If after reading the documentation, you feel you still need advice please contact us at StormForward and we will be happy to help.

Google Analytics - Exclude visits from Dynamically Assigned IP address networks

Recently we ran into a problem where one of our clients manages his website from a connection with a dynamically assigned IP address. We therefore had the challenge of removing his traffic from the stats. We came up with two ways of achieving this goal. Both are good candidates so feel free to use whichever suits you best. Remember your statistics should be as accurate as possible to help determine how to proceed with website changes and marketing plans.

Solution 1 - Cookie Based

This solution involves creating a page and setting a cookie value which can then be filtered out in the profile settings. The benefits of this are that it is simple to set up and manage. You can use this page for anyone whos traffic you want to remove from your site, like external developers, QA/usability testers etc.
To set the cookie you need to create a new page on your domain with the following code:

body onLoad=”javascript:__utmSetVar(’remove_my_traffic’)”

Note that this code is in addition to the actual Google tracking code. I would call the page something non-guessable just to make sure nobody happens to go to this page by mistake.

The final step is to actually create the filter via your Google Analytics account. For this you will need to create an exclude filter to remove data from visitors with this cookie set. Follow the instructions at http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=27207&topic=2970 to create a filter with the following settings:

Next create an exclude filter in google analytics. See here for further instructions on how to create an exclude filter like the following:-

Filter Type: Custom filter > Exclude
Filter Field: User Defined
Filter Pattern: remove_my_traffic
Case Sensitive: No

Then all you have to do is visit this page and your traffic will be filtered out on any profile you apply the filter to.

The downsides to this approach are that if you use multiple browsers you will need to visit the page you created to set the cookie in all of them. If you clear your cookies in any browser you will have to revisit this page to set the variable again. Also there is a slight chance a user can visit this page, but the more obscure you make the page name the harder it will be for a user to accidentally arrive at this page.

Solution 2 - Dyndns.org based

dyndns.org allows you to create a domain and assign it a static IP address, which you can then configure on your router. This then means any traffic going from the network behind your router will always have a static IP address for instance 114.23.23.23. You can then set up an exclude filter based on the following

Filter Type: Exclude all traffic from an IP address
IP address: 114\.23\.23\.23 (the one assigned to you by dyndns.org)

The benefits of this approach are it's fast and simple, it is “set and forget”, you don't need to worry about setting cookies every time you clear your browsers data or decide to use a different browser.

If you are a low traffic start up I would advocate both solutions. Solution 1 for any external testers or developers and Solution 2 for your internal network traffic.

Google Analytics - IP filters

Most site owners and webmasters have Google Analytics on their website, but very few are aware of how powerful and feature-rich the service is. With the right knowledge and correct setup, Google Analytics can be used as an extremely powerful marketing and data mining tool.

Before we can start diving in and analysing our data we should first ensure there is no erroneous data here - by erroneous I mean data collected from visits by staff, either in-house or externally, that you have working for you. To do this we would use the IP filter. For low-traffic sites, it is especially important that Google Analytics is as accurate as possible, particularly if you use the data to make future marketing predictions and decisions.

The IP filter manager can be found in the bottom right hand side of the “Analytics Settings” page.

Where to find the IP filter manager

There are several types of filter that can be set up including filtering visits to your site’s sub-domains or filtering referrals from an entire website. However, the option that we are looking at is “exclude all traffic from an IP address”.

Creating a new filter

If you want to ensure your visits to the site are not included in Analytics, simply select this option and add your IP address. Remember, the IP address must be added using a regular expression: make sure you escape the . with \. for instance 0\.0\.0\.0 not just 0.0.0.0.

Filtering your IP address

You can find your public IP address quickly by visiting www.whatismyip.com. Make sure you get any external agents to give you their IP addresses so you can remove their traffic and keep your data as accurate as possible.

If you need help or advice with setting up Google Analytics filters, contact StormForward Ltd.

Understanding bounce rates

The bounce rate of a page is one of the most important metrics to consider when optimising your pages. But understanding how the bounce rate of a page compares to that of another can be a challenge, particularly in the current Google Analytics layout. Here’s a quick guide.

Entrances, bounces and bounce rate

‘Entrances’ is the number of visits to the page that didn’t come from somewhere else on the site. If 100 people visit a page, and if 80 of them came from the home page and the other 20 came straight to the page from another site, then the page has 20 entrances.

‘Bounces’ is the number of entrances which, when they left the page, went straight to another site. In our previous example, if 10 out of the 20 entrances just clicked ‘back’ and went off somewhere else, the page has 10 bounces.

Note that any number of the other 80 visitors could also have clicked off to another site straight from our page – that doesn’t affect the number of bounces. They would be counted – along with our 10 bounces – as ‘exits’, which is an issue for another day.

The ‘bounce rate’ is simply the number of bounces divided by the number of entrances. So, in our example, the bounce rate would be

10 / 20 = 0.5

or, expressed as a percentage, 50%.

That’s pretty high! What that says to you is that, when people come straight to this page, half the time they just leave your site straight away. This is the only page of your site they see.

Which is fine if you’re isitchristmas.com – but for most of us, this would be a worry.

Confusion in Google Analytics

So far so good – the numbers of entrances and bounces combine to give us a percentage, which is the bounce rate. But in Google Analytics, there are more figures than that, and they can muddy the waters a bit.

Figure 1 – bounces shown as percentage

It makes sense to see the bounce rate as a percentage ...

... but a percentage figure for bounces can be confusing.

For example, you can see in figure 1 that the figure for ‘bounces’ is given as a number and as a percentage. This is because Google Analytics has silently switched tack, and is now comparing the number of bounces on our page to the number of bounces on all the pages added together. This can be an interesting figure, but in the end it will never be as relevant as the bounce rate. In our example page, we have 10 bounces. Our home page, on the other hand, has 1000 bounces – way more than any other page. In fact it accounts for half the bounces recorded on the all the pages of the site put together! But that wouldn’t mean much if the home page was getting a million visits every day. That would give it a bounce rate of 0.001, or 0.1%.

My guess is that the reporting of bounces as a percentage of the site total is more of an afterthought by the Google Analytics team than a well thought-through attempt to give us a useful insight. But as long as you can avoid being sidelined by these less useful metrics, and keep your attention of the bounce rates themselves, you can pick out those underperforming pages and get them into shape.

Quality Vs Quantity?

Exploring the strategies of bringing traffic to your website.

All websites would love to see massive amounts of traffic come into their site, but a point that is often overlooked is the quality of the traffic they are attracting. If you are a business website, you are probably looking to obtain leads, make sales or some other end goal.

Target the Right Audience

When you are trying to attract traffic, whether through pay-per-click advertising, social media marketing, email campaigns or other forms of paid placement, consider how targeted your campaign is. If your site sells gadgets, it is probably unwise to try and attract visitors from a blog about old people's homes. It may do well, but chances are this is not the best target audience.

Thinking about where your visitors are coming from and adjusting your campaigns can bring in a more qualified audience by choosing targets that are closely related to your business or services.

To help determine the quality of your traffic, study your website analytics and discover what your visitors are actually doing when they get to your site. Here are some key things to investigate when analysing your website statistics:

1. Bounce Rate - The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that exit your site from the page they entered on. If you have a high bounce rate, obviously your visitors are not compelled enough to venture any further into your site upon entry. Though remember a landing page, where there is a call-to-action such as completing a form, or making a purchase, it is not considered a “bounce” if the desired goal is converted.
2. Average Time on Site - Look at the average time people spend on your site. This is a great indicator for checking whether users are actually taking the time to read your content or browse your goods, for if you have thousands of people spending 3 seconds on a page that contains a half page essay or 50+ stock items, they obviously aren’t interested in your site. This could be due to the fact that the source where the visitor came from was not targeted correctly, through the link or ad creative.
3. Conversion Rate - If your conversion rates for lead form submissions, sales, click-throughs, sign-ups, or other goals are low, it is quite possible that your traffic is not of high quality.
4. Visitors by Source - When looking at your website analytics and statistics reports, most applications will allow you to drill down to compare statistics such as time on site, bounce rate, conversion rate, etc. between your different sources of traffic. If one of those sources seems to be under performing it could be worth investigating whether the cause of the problem is the quality of traffic from that source, and whether resources could be better spent on more profitable sources.

When aiming to increase the quantity of traffic to your website, take a look at whether or not it is helping you to meet your goals. Do this by analyzing your visitors’ behaviour concerning bounce rate, average time on site, conversion rate, and visitors by source. If you do not currently have this information about your site, you really should! You don’t know success unless you can measure it.

If you do not currently have an analytics solution or don't feel you are using your analytics program to its full potential, we can help. Contact us at StormForward and let us help you turbocharge your website results.