In this article, we’re going to delve into Google Analytics and start to tailor your account settings so you can get information you need much more easily. Google Analytics in Depth is my series of Google Analytics articles where we will explore Google Analytic’s beneficial features to help you get the most out of this powerful and free web tool.
In this first installment, we’ll be covering Goals and Funnels. For a general overview of site analytics revolving around Google Analytics, read Unleashing the Power of Website Analytics.
Defining Your Goals
Setting up goals in Google Analytics is the best way to measure the success rate of your website.
The easiest way to understand what goals are in Google Analytics is by discussing it with an example: ecommerce sites.
The aim of ecommerce sites is to sell goods to their visitors. Therefore, a completed goal would be a successful sale on their website.
This example hints at the first part of using the Goals feature in Google Analytics: defining what your site goals are.
- What do you want to measure?
- What are the factors that determine the success of your website?
- Are you after sales?
- Are you wanting to generate enquiries from prospective clients that want to hire you?
- Or do you simply want visitors to click around and spend more time on your site reading articles?
Once you know your goal (or goals), you need to work out how they will be measured.
For most sites, this will mean either identifying a specific goal completion page (or creating one).
For example, an ecommerce site might set up their ‘order confirmation’ page as their goal, because this page usually comes right after a finished sale. If you’re after client enquiries, then how about the page that is shown to users when they successfully send a message with your web form?
Adding a Goal in Google Analytics
If you haven’t added a goal yet, clicking on Goals in the left hand menu will show you a page that gives a brief overview of what Goals and Funnels are. At the bottom, click on the set up goals and funnels link to get started.
The second box after the Main Website Profile Information section will allow you to set up your conversion goals. You can group your goals together with goal sets, but to start, we’ll just look at setting up one basic goal. Click on the Add goal link on the left, preferably on Goals (set1).
After doing that, you’ll be faced with the Goal Settings page.
Give your goal a name, make it active, and then choose a position; Set 1, Goal 1, for example, refers to your first set of goals, with ‘Goal 1′ indicating that it’s your primary goal.
You will then have three types of goals to choose from.
When you choose a Goal Type, you will be shown a section called Goal Details, which are settings of your goals.
URL Destination
URL Destination is the most common option and is used when visitors get a specific page to visit. For example, a completed checkout page in an ecommerce site.
Time on Site
The Time on Site goal type will track users who spend either more or less than a specified amount of time on the site.
Pages/Visit
Pages/Visit keeps track of people who visit more than, less than or an exact number of pages on the site.
Time on Site and Pages/Visit only give you a single option aside from setting the goal and that is goal value.
Goal Details
For each goal type, there are certain goal details that you can set to customize your goal.
Goal Value
All three goal types have the Goal Value option. It is a monetary return that you estimate a completed goal to be worth; this is normally worked out as part of a website marketing strategy or review.
As an example, if a website enquiry, on average, gives a return of $10, then you should set the goal value to $10.
In most cases, this is just an estimate, so if you’re not sure, you can set the Goal Value to 0.
In the case of ecommerce sites where a completed checkout is worth a variable amount, you can set the goal value to your average basket value.
If you’ve set up Time on Site or Pages/Visit as your goal type, you’re now done and you can click the Save Goal button.
If, however, you’re setting up a URL Destination as a goal type, read on.
Match Type
The Match Type goal detail has three options: Head Match, Exact Match, Regular Expression Match.
Which one to use will depend on how much variety there is in the URL or your goal page.
Head Match: If your goal page requires variables in the URL that can change, such as /checkout/?page=1&basket=50036, then using Head Match will match the starting string of the URL (/checkout/).
Exact Match: If your goal page is a static URL that doesn’t change, such as /contact/thanks.php, for example, then you’ll want to go for Exact Match.
Regular Expression Match: If it’s likely that the start of the URL could change, then you should use Regular Expression Match; this is useful with URL cases such as /department1/checkout.php and /department2/checkout.php.
That’s it for Goals in Google Analytics—let’s move onto Funnels.
Setting up funnel
What are funnels? For certain goal pages, there is a set route of pages that users must go through to get to your goal page.
Let’s take a typical checkout process on an ecommerce site as an example: You add something to the basket, enter your shipping details, add your payment details, and when you submit your order, you get a confirmation page (which is your goal page).
This path is known as a funnel process, and by tracking people’s progress through a funnel, you can see where there are problems and where people are leaving the process.
This is most often used for checkout processes to see where people are dropping their shopping cart baskets. Funnels highlight problems with a long-winded checkout procedure.
Firstly, you need to map out the pages of your process. For example, your checkout process might have these pages:
basket.phpshipping_details.phppayment.phpconfirmation.php
Once you’ve determined your funnel, it’s time to review your goals.
Reviewing Goals
So your goals are all set up, now how do you actually find out information from them?
You can see your goal data straight from the Sites Overview page. Under the headings you’ll see a completed goals column which gives you a basic, straightforward figure that is excellent for a quick glance. But let’s have a deeper look.
Note: A quick thing to highlight is that whilst you can look at visitor numbers for the current day, you’re unlikely to get goal conversions in Google Analytics for the current day, at least not reliably anyway. This is because Google Analytics refreshes its data at regular set intervals, so it is better to look at data from the days before the current day.
The basic goal page, which is obtained by clicking on Goals on the main left-hand menu, provides the immediate information you need at your fingertips.
You’ll see the standard Google trend timeline and the breakdown of how many visitors completed which goals—this is more useful when you have multiple conversions set up. You’ll then get the conversion rate and the goal value if you’ve entered a value for a conversion.
All these are fairly straightforward and the goal conversion figure is the one that most people will tend to concentrate on and quote, especially with ecommerce websites.
So moving down the left hand side, you now have a number of extra menu options that we’ll look at in turn.
Total Conversions:
This shows the total number of conversions and breaks it down by day for the period you’ve selected. This gives an easy visual comparison of better performing days and can help identify trends – do you get more conversions on weekends, maybe?
Conversion rate:
This looks the same as total conversions, right? Well, it is similar, and on sites that don’t have massive differences in traffic from day to day, they’ll look almost identical. However, where the total conversions page was based on the number of conversions per day, 40 conversions being larger than 10, for instance, conversion rate is based on the number of conversions as a proportion of the total visits for that day. So 40 conversions out of 120 is a rate of 25% – 10 out of 20 is 50%, so the weighting now changes.
Goal Verification Path:
This will list all the pages a completed goal was carried out on. If you’ve used an absolute path (e.g. /contact/thanks.php) they should all be the same. But if you’ve used a head match and the end of the URL varies, then this will show which URL each goal conversion comes from.
For example: if you have a shopping cart and the end of the URL is just the cart id, it won’t be much use as they’ll all be different, but if you have something more meaningful in the URL—lets say the source of the site visit or conversions on different sub domains—then it can become useful.
If you have golf.shop.com/finished and football.shop.com/finished, you can quickly compare where your conversions are happening.
Reverse Goal Path:
This data point shows the pages people landed on leading up to a completed goal. This is useful for seeing which pages are funneling more conversions, and for those results showing (entrance), which landing pages are funneling those conversions.
So as an example, we have thanks.php set as our conversion:
- (entrance) >
index.php > contact.php > thanks.php
This shows that the visitor landing on the homepage went next to the contact page and then completed a conversion; you can quickly see which pages funnel in more conversions and easily start to work out which pages are more successful to understand how you can improve other pages.
Goal Value:
If you have various goals set up with different values, you can use this page to quickly see which days are more profitable and then use other tools to dig down into why.
Goal Abandoned Funnels:
This page gives you an overview of the number of people who enter the goal conversion funnel, but exit without completing a goal. You can quickly see how many potential conversions your site is losing and again compare over the time period you have selected.
Funnel Visualization:
Once you open up this page, it is self-explanatory: the usual timeline chart at the top of the page and then a flow diagram through the funnel you set up.
At each stage, you can see how many people enter at that stage, how many people are continuing in the funnel from the previous stage, how many people leave at that stage without completing, and perhaps most importantly, where they are going.
This is hugely useful for analyzing things such as checkout processes and seeing where users abandon their shopping carts and where they go.
For instance, if you have the first stage as the shopping basket, it wouldn’t be too alarming to see people exiting from there to continue browsing the site. But if they’re exiting all together, maybe something on the shopping cart page is making them drop from the process?
You can then look and see where people are dropping out and this can easily highlight problematic or broken forms and links or long-winded pages that people simply give up on.
Drilling down even further
The basic pages give you a very useful set of tools to analyse your conversions and abandonment, however, if you want an extra level of detail, the advanced segments tab can provide some very handy information.
Located in the top right of the page just above the trend graph and date picker, it will open up a drop down with a list of visitor types.
Selecting them via the tick box will show the relevant figures on the page and allow you quickly compare visitor types. Are conversions for new visitors higher than returning visitors? Do people who arrive via paid search (Adwords) abandon more carts than those who arrive by organic search? These are some of the questions that you can answer by using Google Analytics.
(Via Six Revisions.)
Editor’s note: In the following guest post, Fliqz CEO Benjamin Wayne reveals some of the secrets of using video to help boost the search results rankings of your website. Fliqz is an online video platform.
As most search engine optimization (SEO) experts are aware, getting a first-page Google result is harder than ever. Not only do Google’s search and indexing algorithms continue to evolve in complexity, but Google has given over more and more of its search results real estate to ‘blended’ search results, displaying videos and images towards the top of the first page, and pushing down—and sometimes off the page—traditional web results that would have otherwise competed for top rankings.
But where problems arise, so do opportunities. Although Google’s newfound enthusiasm for video has created more competition for fewer traditional search results, it has enabled sites with video assets—even sites that would otherwise score poorly in the Google index—to successfully achieve first-page rankings. In fact, Forrester Research found that videos were 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking.
Here’s what a blended search result looks like for the search query ‘777 built in 4 minutes‘:
Those images at the top of the search results are video thumbnails, and today, there’s only two ways to get there:
1. Upload your video to YouTube.
The advantage of this is that you are 100% certain to be indexed into Google’s search engine. This does not guarantee you’ll get a first-page result, but at least it ensures that Google knows your content exists.
The drawback, of course, is that anyone who clicks on a YouTube result will be taken to YouTube, which may be fine if your goal is branding (i.e., you only care that people watch your video). If your goal is driving traffic, as is typically the case with SEO, this won’t be a successful strategy.
Your other alternative is:
2. Video SEO
Video SEO is a set of techniques designed to make sure that:
- Google finds your video content
- Google successfully indexes your video content
- Google will display your video content when specific keywords are entered as search terms
Here’s how to make it work:
You Need Video Content
Google is fairly flexible in what it considers to be video content. You can use actual video footage, but screen captures, slide shows, animated PowerPoint slides, and other content will work just as well. Google can’t actually ‘see’ what’s inside the video content, so it relies on title and other meta-data to determine what content your video actually contains.
Submission, Not Discovery
With traditional web pages, Google utilizes crawlers to discover and index web content. Unfortunately, Google can’t read Flash very well (although it is trying), and as a result, most video content is invisible to Google’s search crawlers. Therefore, the best way to appear in Google’s blended search results is to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap. This is similar to an XML sitemap, but is formatted specifically for video, and only contains information about your video content. It is submitted using Google’s Webmaster Tools.
The most common error in Video SEO is to assume that because you have submitted the web page on which a video resides, that the video content itself is being indexed.
You’ll also need to make sure that you have a robots.txt file on all video pages, to ensure that Google can easily verify that the locations on the Web you’ve submitted do in fact exist, and that they contain embed codes which indicate the presence of a video.
Title and Title Tags
When ranking videos, Google primarily considers the match between search keywords and the video title. Although Google allows you to submit other meta-data such as description and keywords, these currently don’t have much influence on your search ranking. Google likes it when the title tag of the page matches the title of the video, and will give a higher weighting for results where this is the case.
Video SEO is Long Tail
Like traditional SEO, you’re much more likely to see results with Video SEO if you target more specific, or longer tail, search terms. A video titled ‘Dog’ is unlikely to produce a first-page ranking, while a video titled ‘German Shepherd Police Dog’ will be more likely to score well in Google’s algorithm. Since Google can’t determine the actual content of the video, you might consider submitting the same video multiple times with different titles that match potential search terms.
New and Small Don’t Matter
With traditional SEO, the age of a website is an important consideration for Google in deciding its ranking. Google also considers things like the number of pages on the site, and the number of links to the site, along with the importance of the places those links originate.
In Video SEO, none of this matters. This means that even new sites and small sites can compete on equal footing with larger and more established players. Publishers who are too small or too new to even consider traditional SEO can still be taking advantage of Video SEO opportunities.
For the Foreseeable Future, Video SEO is a Winning Strategy
As time goes by, Google’s discovery and indexing of video content will no doubt become more sophisticated, and as competition for video results increases, it will become harder for sites to achieve these first-page rankings. However, the number of web pages still massively outnumbers indexed video assets, and for as long as that continues, publishers will have an opportunity to jump to the top of Google’s search results through Video SEO.
(Via TechCrunch.)
Mark Suster is a Partner at GRP Partners, a Venture Capital firm in Los Angeles. He blogs at Both Sides of the Table and can be found on Twitter at @msuster.
I’m often asked by entrepreneurs and business owners whether it is worth blogging, and if so, what they should blog about. On the first question, the answer is obvious to me — you must blog as an entrepreneur.
In this post I’ll cover why you need to blog, how to determine what to blog about, and finding your blog’s voice.
Why You Must Blog
I believe that blogging in your business is vital to creating a public personae and making your company more accessible. In an era where companies like Zappos have differentiated themselves based on service, it is important to be public and accessible.
My industry of venture capital, for example, has been shrouded in secrecy for 30 years, making the process of raising funds opaque for most entrepreneurs. When I started my first company in 1999, there were almost no public sources of venture capital fund raising information. Years later I discovered the blog of VC Brad Feld, then later VentureHacks, and Fred Wilson’s technology & VC blog, each of which clarified and demystified the venture capital process.
So when I started blogging, I mainly viewed it as ‘earned media,’ or a chance to let entrepreneurs get to know me by sharing my thoughts online with complete transparency; a concept that is repeatable for any business.
In less than a year I’ve attracted a large monthly following of readers who come to my blog to discuss how to build startups, how to raise money, and to get my thoughts on technology markets. By publicly sharing my thoughts, I’ve been able to engage in online discussions with people all over the world, and though it was an unintended consequence, my deal flow has gone up dramatically. In other words, blogging can be a valuable networking tool and help the bottom line.
What Should You Blog About?
Start by defining the audience with whom you want to have a relationship. Presumably they are your customers, partners, suppliers and your broader industry as a whole. You should think about what kind of information they would find valuable. You should also try to talk about something that is differentiated from what other blogs in your field cover, even if your approach is just slightly different or new.
Make sure the topic is something that you’ll have a passion for writing about on a regular basis. If you’re not going to keep up with your blog, you shouldn’t start one in the first place. It’s a commitment, believe me. If you pick a topic that relates to your customers, but you’re not that passionate about it, then you may have a bigger problem on your hands!
The Right and Wrong Way to Blog
Let me give some examples of the right and wrong approach to blogging.
Right: I always liked the Mint.com blog. Even in the early days when they were relatively unknown, they blogged about personal finance. They talked about how to manage credit and balance your bank account — obvious topics for a startup focused on managing personal money. They were able to take a leadership role in talking about managing your money in a way that supported their brand and created a community around their product.
Wrong: A friend of mine has a company in the personal finance space also. His blog was all about how to run a startup and raise venture capital. He was outrageous, brash and crass in his style, and I told him so. I said, ‘Your goal isn’t to be the cool kid in the venture capital circles. Your job is to build a great company and you’ll be a hero in entrepreneurial circles as a result of your success. Speak to your customers — that is what a blog is for.’
Finding Your Blog’s Voice
So you know you need to blog, and you’re convinced you ought to write about something you’re passionate about and that speaks to your customers. How can you create something that people will want to come and read every day?
1. Be authentic
The thing that kills most blogs, in my view, is when you can tell that the writer is just going through the motions. You need to find a ‘voice’ that is authentically yours. People will get used to your style and your style will become your signature.
2. Be transparent
The ‘old school’ way of getting media attention was to submit press releases. These were artificially crafted documents that were filled with glowing reviews of your company. In short, they felt fake. The best way to establish your voice is to be transparent.
Be willing to talk like a human being. Be willing to show feelings and a point of view. Let your inner self come out rather than your ‘inner bullet point.’ Don’t use too much lingo. Don’t feel like your prose has to sound like it was crafted by a university professor. Just speak!
3. Get inside your readers’ minds
I give this advice often and in many scenarios, including public speaking. When people speak to many audiences, they sometimes get into a canned routine. They give the same presentation no matter which crowd they’re addressing. The key is that each time you present, you need to think about who is in the audience and what they want to hear. The same is true for blogging.
On my blog, my audience is made of startup entrepreneurs and probably other VCs. When I write I try to be mindful of who these people are, the knowledge I assume they have, and what I believe they want to know.
4. Solicit feedback
I ask people what they want to read about. I regularly ask for feedback on what I’m writing. When people give me good suggestions, I try to cover those topics.
When community members write awesome comments, I’ll sometimes write a post about what they said to highlight them and their contributions. In my opinion, the best way to build an audience over time is to engage with them and to highlight those that really contribute positively to you.
5. Don’t be offensive or take big public risks
I sometimes read blogs that get extreme. I read a blog once that jokingly suggested ‘offering your angels cocaine if that would get them to invest.’ It was intended to be funny. It wasn’t. And comments like this run the risk of offending people. This was a blog about personal finance, and I found the comment totally irresponsible and at odds with the brand image the blogger was trying to project.
I read a blog yesterday where the author was trying to make fun of a negative comment he got on his product. The blogger highlighted him and called him ‘retarded,’ which I, and I’m sure many others, find offensive. There’s no upside to this type of comment, but there’s a big downside. My esteem for him went down.
Further, unless your company revolves around taking stands on controversial issues, it’s best to leave your political commentary at home. Statements like these stand to upset or anger half of your potential customers no matter what side you take.
6. Have fun
This may be obvious, but if writing a blog becomes a chore for you it will show. Try to make your writing fun and it will be easier to stick to. It will also reflect in your voice.
Happy blogging!
(Via Mashable!.)
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