The online interface offered by Google Analytics offers a wealth of easily-accessible, business-oriented data and reporting about the usage of your website. But it has it’s limitations. Recently, when attempting to segment branded and non-branded keyword traffic for one of our larger clients (which, by the way, is a good idea for anyone who wants to understand whether their SEO efforts are gaining traction), we ran into one such limitation.  Here’s the scenario: in order to capture all of the possible brand-related terms associated with our client, we created regular expressions matching variations of each (20 in all), and plugged them into two Advanced Segments in Google Analytics (one segment to exclude those terms, and one to match only those terms).  After quite a bit of work (identifying the branded terms, writing the RegExes, creating the Advanced Segments, etc.), we clicked the Advanced Segments “on” with eager anticipation.  And voila! Here’s the spiffy chart that appeared:

Hooray! Just what we wanted – visitor trends by branded and non-branded keyword traffic!  But wait, what about that little yellow box of fine print? It reads: “This report is based on sampled data. Learn more.”  So what exactly does that mean to us?  Check out the data table that Analytics presented us with:

The numbers for branded and non-branded traffic *should* add-up to 100% of the visits… but they don’t.  See those little yellow boxes next to the segmented data? Those depict the margin of error that Google’s data sampling resulted in. Basically, the statement “This report is based on sampled data” means that the numbers aren’t as precise as we might like them to be. In fact, the margin of error on some of our results was over 70%!  Kind of a big deal…

After a little experimentation, it became clear that neither the size, nor the complexity, of my Advanced Segments were triggering the use of sampling.  Instead, it turns out that the number of visits contained in the selected date range was the determining factor – specifically those instances where the total visits exceeded 500,000.  In order to return reports for large data sets quickly, Google employs sampling whenever it generates a report through the online interface that isn’t automatically compiled.

The take home message?  If you’ve got large volumes of Analytics data that you want to slice-and-dice, you might be better served to pull the raw data from Google using the Analytics API and perform the calculations on your own!

We love the Google Analytics e-commerce system, in no small part because it is so “simple”: what you see is what you get, and it can basically be used to reflect your shopping cart system’s understanding of any given transaction.

The most essential double-check comes from the fact that any given sale is made up of two independent measures: The Transaction report and the Product report.

Read More

Interested in learning the ins and outs of Google Analytics? Then our Google Analytics course is the place for you. This class translates Analytics to help you achieve your business goals.

Course Overview

Google Analytics is free to all advertisers and site owners, and has been re-designed for increased effectiveness. Installing Analytics code on your site is only the first step in the process of making this powerful tool work for your organization.

Regardless of familiarity with their website goals, users are faced with the same questions:

• How do I know what Analytics reports and features to use?
• How can I measure success for my site?
• What metrics are most important, and what do they really mean?
• Do I know the latest techniques for leveraging these metrics to increase my site’s traffic and sales?
• How do I get the most out of my limited management time while still getting the most out of my account?

Our course, on Friday February 19th, is an all-day workshop that provides a foundation of proven principles that will help you succeed in using Google Analytics to improve your site’s performance. Regardless of whether you’re a beginner just setting up your account, or a web analyst with years of experience this class will help you optimize your site.

Course Highlights

You will learn how to:

• Translate Analytics metrics and reports for real success on your site
• Find out who your best customers are
• Narrow in on which of your marketing channels are not working
• Maximize leads or sales through focus on landing pages
• Track your goals the RIGHT way
• Efficiently manage an account
• Learn how to apply your skills to all web analytic tools
• Hands-on experience using proven methods to analyze your own Analytics account

Who: Anyone who is currently using Google Analytics or interested in learning more about it.

When: Friday, February 19th 9:00 – 4:00 (lunch break from Noon – 1:30)

Where: Pure Visibility offices, 201 S. Main St., 5th Floor, Ann Arbor, MI 48104

Prerequisites: Attendees must have a Google Analytics account and a laptop computer

Cost: $695 per person if you book today.

Click here to register

If you’re like most marketing managers we talk to, chances are you’re using Google Analytics and learning some good stuff! Chances are you’ve also got some nagging feeling that there’s more to learn if only you had time to fully explore Google Analytics and discover all the truly great stuff hidden inside.

However, given the world shortage on time, and given Google’s propensity to add new features to Analytics every time you log in, we’re sorry to say the odds aren’t exactly in your favor. That was, until you found Pure Visibility. (Wink. Wink.)

Seriously though, we hear this conundrum repeated every day. You are not alone! And since we are an organization full of problem solvers, we have a couple ideas that may help:

1) A “Drivers Ed for Google Analytics” course, designed to help you get to all the good stuff faster. We know you’re busy so we’ve boiled it down to one day, with a nice long lunch so you don’t have to fall too far behind on email – or you can check out an awesome restaurant while you’re downtown Ann Arbor. We’re sure you’ll come away with something that changes the way you think about your business; and you’ll be armed with data to make decisions like never before.

2) We also provide analysis as a service. Most often it’s bundled with our other internet marketing services that together, are designed to increase your sales. The magic in that analysis is worth a post of its own so we’ll tackle that another day.

In the meantime, we hope to see you at a class someday soon!

Pure Visibility was recently selected to join the Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network. As part of the thorough application process we had to demonstrate our expertise in applying analytics data to online marketing campaigns.  Andy Chapelle of Crain’s Detroit Business interviewed Linda Girard in Crain’s Detroit Business to find out what this means for Pure Visibility and why this endorsement is so important.

Pure Visibility Inc. joins exclusive group of Web analytic service providers

Hi everyone,

Megan and I are in lovely Mountain View, California at the GAAC conference. We have been asked to restrict our blogging and tweeting unless the speaker specifically says we can share.

Tomorrow morning the keynote speaker is Avinash Kaushik, so keep your fingers crossed and stay tuned! I will post and tweet if allowed. Our Twitter account is @purevisibility.

At Pure Visibility, we savor opportunities to do some detective work for our clients. Analytics offers us great opportunities to dig into what users are doing on websites.

One of our clients has a website geared toward generating leads (as opposed to, say, an e-commerce site). The majority of the leads from the site come from people that are on the site for the very first time, but many leads come from people that visit the site, and then come back later for a second visit.

We got to wondering: when somebody visits the site a second time, how do they get back?

In Google Analytics, we organize the visitors to the site into four categories, based on how they got there:

• Organic: Found the site in non-paid search engine results
• PPC: Paid search advertising
• Direct: Typed in the URL directly, or had bookmarked it
• Referral: Followed a link from another site

We could imagine scenarios where visitors came for their second visit through any of those channels. After discussing the matter, we theorized that the second time people visited, they would either type in the URL (or use a bookmark) or do the search again – they would be more likely to be Direct or Organic traffic, the second time around.

The argument for them being Direct is intuitive. After all, if you’re doing research on different websites before making a purchasing decision, why wouldn’t you write down the URL for sites that seem promising?

On the other hand, the Google and other search engines are increasingly becoming people’s way of bookmarking sites. That is, instead of actually using the bookmarking functionality in their browsers, people just do the same search over and over and find the site they want in search results.

To settle this question, we turned to advanced segmenting in Google Analytics. This functionality lets you filter visitors on the site based on most of the things that Analytics measures. In this case, we created a segment that just shows the people that are on their second visit.

Then, we went to the Traffic Sources section of Analytics, to the All Traffic Sources report, and filtered down to Medium. This is the report that can give you insight into the ways that people are getting to your site. We compared the new segment we created to All Visitors.

This is where we had to pull out a spreadsheet and do a little math. First we recorded the numbers from Analytics in this table. Then, we totaled up all those visits and found out the proportion of visits in each category.

As you can see in the spreadsheet, a higher proportion of visitors used search to find their way back to the website for their second visit – from 32% of all visits to 40% of 2nd visit traffic. It looks like the other channels’ share decreased a bit. It was surprising to see that the share of Direct traffic went down slightly, but it was nice to see that fewer people clicked on an ad to get to the site for their second visit!

So what? What do we do with this knowledge? Well, you never know when a bit of research will come in handy, one day. Knowing that users are more likely to choose search when they want to get back to the client’s site underlines the importance of branding. Whether the users search for the client’s name, or do a general search and pick the client’s site out of the search engine results, it comes down to the user knowing the client’s name. Also, we now have another bit of data that we can bake into a user persona when we describe how they might research and choose our client.

A constant source of frustration in the world of SEM is the seemingly conscious decision by Google to prevent the analyst from running reports detailing conversions and conversion rate by hour. From a campaign management perspective, it’s extremely valuable data for day parting.

Day Parting, for those who are unaware, is a technique allowing you to adjust bid rates by time of day and/or day of the week with the goal of taking advantage of times with high conversion rates or low cost-per-leads, while not wasting money during the less effective and more expensive times.

I can see the Google Ann Arbor building out the window next to me, and I’ve shaken my fist in that direction a few times before, but today I’ll avoid the conspiracy theories of why Google would not want to share this beautiful data with us, and instead refocus that anxious energy on solving the problem!

THERE IS A WAY! With a little mixing and mashing of reports from AdWords and Google Analytics, its possible to conjure up  a report that gives conversions by hour (regardless of date) and by day of week. To do this, you will need to have ‘Conversion Goals’ set up in analytics already. If you don’t, do that now and come back in a month.

Let’s map this out….

What do I want?
A report detailing Conversions and Conversion Rate by time of day (regardless of date) at the Campaign level.

1.) In AdWords reports:
Report type: Campaign Performance
Settings: Hourly (regardless of date),  choose a date range and your campaign of choice.

Run the report, and export to .CSV for Excel.

2.) Lets go to Analytics!
- Set the date range for the same time period.
- On the left-hand side, click Goals, then Total Conversions.
- Underneath the graph, it gives you the option to ‘Select Goal’.  For this example, I choose to select ‘All Goals’.
- Next, graph by time of day.  This option is located in the square with a clock in it by the top right corner of the graph.
- Now we need to filter the data to include only the campaign we’re interested in.  To do this, we’ll need to create a new Advanced Segment.

3.) Advanced Segmentation
- Click ‘Create a new advanced segment’
- Dimensions –> Traffic Sources
- Drag ‘Campaign’ to the ‘Dimension or Metric’ box,  choose your campaign from the drop down menu, and name the segment.
- Click the ‘create segment’ button.
- Un-click the ‘All Visits’ tab, and select your newly created one.
- Export the data into a .CSV for Excel

4.) Mash it up!
- Make sure your Time Zones for AdWords and Analytics are the same (and then double check, this is pretty important…)
- Select your Conversion Rate data from the analytics .CSV you just created, and line it up with the AdWords spreadsheet from step 1.
- Format the data however you please.  I’ve added Conversion Rate, Cost/Lead, and % of total Leads

5.) Visualize the data, and interpret it accordingly.

6.) Day Parting
You’ve analyzed the data, came up with a plan of action, and now your ready to optimize your Ad Scheduling.
- Back in AdWords now, click into Settings for the chosen campaign.  Under Advanced Settings, you may now edit to your heart’s content.

Voila! Together, we’ve outsmarted Google for a minute *high five*, and avoided purchasing a 3rd party software!
Now as mentioned earlier, you can view the data by day of the week also.  The only changes that you’ll have to make are adjusting the unit of time you want to view in AdWords to ‘Day of Week’, and in Analytics, view data by day (then organize and aggregate once in a spreadsheet).

Yet another small victory that makes life exciting!

Urchin 6.6, an upgrade of Google Analytics Urchin software goes public today. As certified Urchin resellers, Pure Visibility was happy to be part of a beta release of the software.

Here’s the short list on what you need to know: Urchin version 6.6 is a significant upgrade. Features include further AdWords integrations, past problems taken care of, plus some exciting new Roll-Up reporting as in Google Analytics. Not to mention a host of new reports!

One interesting note – with this version Google has even made a move to integrate with competitor YSM for users who need this data. Nice work as usual, Google.

Details on the Features Added in Urchin 6.6

Deep integration with Google AdWords

• Budget Alerts: Users are warned if the budget for an AdWords campaign is in imminent danger of being exhausted. This information is provided automatically from the AdWords system.
• Keyword Generation Tool: This allows you to generate pertinent keywords and to see their projected performance/budget information. It also allows you to add newly generated keywords and delete existing keywords from AdWords campaigns.
• Direct links to the AdWords system: this feature allow you to navigate directly from Urchin to the appropriate screen in your AdWords account, bypassing the login process (assuming you have entered your Adwords account info into Urchin previously)
• The Urchin Tag Manager (or, “semi auto-tagging”): this feature inserts a dynamic keyword insertion tag {keyword} in ad destination URLs. This feature simplifies the URL tagging process and allows you to easily import AdWords cost data into Urchin. See this AdWords help article for more information.
• AdWords Optimizer: this allows you to optimize your campaign in Urchin and automatically propagate changes into AdWords.
• Copy Campaign Tool: this allows you to copy keyword campaigns into your AdWords account from other campaigns or other ad networks such as Yahoo Search Marketing.

Advertiser View and Advertisement Optimization reporting section

• An Advertiser View profile template and Advertisement Optimization section have been added to provide additional options for advertisement-related reports and to support the above mentioned AdWords-related features.

New reports

• - “Time On Site” report: this report shows the length of time visitors spent on the site in question. It is located under Content Optimization -> Content Performance -> Engagement Metrics.
• - “Performance Comparison” report: this report allows you to compare Campaign, Keyword and Content performance across sources/mediums (e.g. Google|CPC vs Yahoo|organic). It is located in Advertisement Optimization -> Marketing Campaign Results.
• – “CPC Structure” reports: this set of reports is found under Advertisement Optimization. CPC Structure analyzes your campaigns in a handy drilldown tree structure.
• - “Campaign View” report: this report displays paid UTM campaign information (Google and Yahoo campaigns supported).
• - “Keywords View” report: this report displays paid keyword information.

Data API

• – The Data Export API allows you to retrieve Urchin reporting data via SOAP 1.x and REST protocols. Read more about the API in the help center article.

External Authentication (LDAP)

• - In addition to Urchin-specific authentication (now called ‘Native’), Urchin 6.6 supports external authentication that can be configured on ‘per user’ basis. External authentication modules for LDAP and MSAD are provided with Urchin 6.6, while custom modules can be integrated by modifying the configuration files.

New Urchin “Home” Page, or the Rollup Report

• - The Urchin “home” page (the one you get just after logging in) has been modified to provide metrics for all the profiles that are visible to the logged-in user. Profile metrics are provided for the current day (today) and the most recent week, month and year.

Automated CPC Data Import from Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM)

• - Urchin 6.6 allows you to import CPC data from Yahoo Search Marketing in addition to AdWords. YSM campaigns may be copied into an AdWords account via the newly introduced Copy Campaign tool.

Miscellaneous

• - Urchin 6.6, like Urchin 5, allows you to cancel a running log processing job gracefully (without corrupting the database).

Bug Fixes & Feature Enhancements

Administration

• - In Urchin 6.5 and prior versions, profile-related folders were not renamed when a profile was renamed on the admin interface. This has been fixed.

Log Processing

• - In certain cases, Urchin was encountering segmentation fault while processing ELF2 logs. This was resulting in incomplete log processing job and inconsistent reporting data. This has been fixed.
• – Incorrect treatment of the profile’s local-time configuration during log processing was resulting in the reporting data being shifted by hours in the months. This was happening for the months when day light saving starts or ends for the selected profile’s timezone. This has been fixed.

SSL Support

• – A problem with connecting to Urchin via https on Windows 2003 has been fixed.

Utilities

• - The reporting data migration utility (convert-u5data) has been significantly improved. A problem with importing large amounts of data from Urchin 5.7 into Urchin 6.6 has been fixed.

Miscellaneous

• The Urchin Embedded Help and various online Urchin Help Center articles have been updated.

• We occasionally get asked for recommendations on books, blogs, and other resources for those who are new to web metrics and measurement. So, here is a round-up of Pure Visibility’s top five web analytics resources:
  • Best book for Web Analytics: Web Analytics: An Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik.If you’ve dabbled at all in SEO, you may remember an SEO: An Hour a Day book. Well, the same publisher has contracted one of Google’s top web analytics minds, Avinash Kaushik, to write this similar guide on web analytics. It is introductory, but picking it up guarantees that you’ll be getting your introduction from the best, meaning no best practices left unmentioned.
  • Best blog for Web Analytics: If you like the book, another fantastic source from the same author is Avinash Kaushik’s blog, Occam’s Razor.

  This source is especially great for unpacking the oft-confusing definitions of web metrics. It is also a good place for those using Google Analytics, as Avinash is known to include detailed step-by-step introductions to the new features that Google introduces.

  • Best book for Website Optimization (SEO-focus): O’Reilly book Website Optimization.

  How does this pertain to Web Analytics? Well, in our estimation, it is virtually impossible to do any real good for your website through measurement without a sound understanding of Search Engine Optimization. The content in this guide, which covers everything from paid search to the more technical issues that can lead to problems with a site, definitely lives up to the high standards O’Reilly sets for its manuals.

  • Best book for Landing Page Optimization (testing): Landing Page Optimization by Tim Ash.

  Landing Page Optimization is the design and implementation of tests for landing pages in your website. By setting up well-planned and executed tests, you can quickly increase the ROI you are seeing for the site. This book is by an entrepreneur of one of the most advanced companies who specialize in large scale testing. It is detailed and well-written, and the discussions of various strategies remain focused on the ultimate objective, of increasing revenue.

  • Best Holistic Marketing Measurement Blog: Forrester Research’s Interactive Marketing Measurement Blog.

    Forrester is known for their excellent insight into the trends in marketing, online and off, through comprehensive research. This blog is a great resource for interactive marketing measurement, including larger trends like social media engagement measurement, and lead management, both of which tend to be entwined with our more traditional definitions of web analytics.

Got any more favorite resources for Web Analytics? Share them with us!

Read More