the fat guide to google analytics

The Fat-Free Guide to Google Analytics Using Google Analytics for Business Analytics

By Ian Lurie

Portent Interactive

Conversation Marketing

From Google Analytics to Business Analytics 2

Legal, Notes and Other Stuff © 2010, The Written Word, Inc. d/b/a Portent Interactive and Ian Lurie. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Click here to read the license.

That’s a fancy way of saying: Ian scrapes out a living writing and selling books like these. Please, buy a copy.

If you like this book, you might want to check out Ian’s blog at www.ConversationMarketing.com, and his company, at www.portent.com.

If you want to talk to Ian, you can reach him at [email protected] or on Twitter at

@portentint


Table of Contents

The Cure For Analytics Phobia ......................................................................................................................................................................... 6

A Business Analytics System ............................................................................................................................................................................. 7 A Business Analytics System: B2B.................................................................................................................................................................................. 8 A Business Analytics System: Charities........................................................................................................................................................................ 9 A Business Analytics System: News ............................................................................................................................................................................... 9

1. How to: Install Google Analytics.............................................................................................................................................................10 Resources: Google Analytics Install.............................................................................................................................................................................15

2. Setting up and tracking goals..................................................................................................................................................................16 Figuring out your goal and goal page..........................................................................................................................................................................17 Example: A membership site .........................................................................................................................................................................................19 Setting up a page-based goal in Google Analytics...................................................................................................................................................21 Setting up a non-page-based goal in Google Analytics..........................................................................................................................................25 Lots of goals .........................................................................................................................................................................................................................28

3. Calculating & Applying Value..................................................................................................................................................................29 Customer value: E-commerce........................................................................................................................................................................................32 Customer value: Lead generation ................................................................................................................................................................................32 Customer value: Publishing ...........................................................................................................................................................................................33 Customer value: Anything else......................................................................................................................................................................................35 Lead conversion rate........................................................................................................................................................................................................36 Click conversion rate........................................................................................................................................................................................................38


Click value: An e-commerce site...................................................................................................................................................................................40 Click value: A business-to-business site ....................................................................................................................................................................41 Fudging it..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................42 Sample data .........................................................................................................................................................................................................................44 Resources: Value Calculation ........................................................................................................................................................................................45

4. Measuring and Building Growth ............................................................................................................................................................46 Tracking content performance: A quick trick..........................................................................................................................................................48 Tracking traffic sources ..................................................................................................................................................................................................49 Tracking traffic sources: Referring sites ...................................................................................................................................................................52 Referring sites: An example ...........................................................................................................................................................................................53 Tracking traffic sources: Keywords ............................................................................................................................................................................56 Improving growth using traffic sources: Examples ...............................................................................................................................................64 Tracking content performance.....................................................................................................................................................................................65 Tracking content performance: Context matters ...................................................................................................................................................69 Finding high-performing content ................................................................................................................................................................................70 Other ways to find ‘good’ content.................................................................................................................................................................................73 Improving growth by finding ‘good’ content: E-commerce.................................................................................................................................74 Finding and improving poor-performing content..................................................................................................................................................75 Final points about growth ..............................................................................................................................................................................................82

5. What’s next....................................................................................................................................................................................................83 Additional resources ........................................................................................................................................................................................................85 About Ian Lurie & Portent Interactive........................................................................................................................................................................86

Other stuff by Ian Lurie.....................................................................................................................................................................................87 Contacting Ian Lurie .........................................................................................................................................................................................................87


Google Analytics Scares the Snot Out of You

You’re not alone.

It’s a great program. But with

dozens of metrics and dozens

more possible ways to view them,

there are literally thousands of

possible reports, data points

and other goodies in your

analytics report.


The Cure For Analytics Phobia

Google Analytics is overwhelming because

people often let the reports drive their

research & strategy. So they click

around, trying to take in every last digit.

The cure? Have a goals-focused

method for using Google Analytics.

That will help you pick and choose

which reports to use and when,

and keep you from getting lost in the data.

You need a business analytics system.


A Business Analytics System

You need to perform business analytics.

You can do that by focusing on what really matters to your business: Things that

generate value and improve growth.

Value comes from whatever generates bottom-line dollars or results for your

organization. Value = the value of one click that brings a visitor to your site. It’s

the King (Queen) of all analytics. Without it, nothing else matters.

Growth is all about reach and audience access. Growth is what you get when you

can bring more visitors and introduce them to the pipeline. The pipeline only

improves if your visitors want what you’re offering and find it when they arrive

on your site. Growth is all about visit source and quality: Where visitors come

from, how long they stay on your site, how many pages they look at, and how

engaged they really are.


That value-growth duo is what drives your business, whether you know it or not.

If you use it when you look at Google Analytics, it’ll keep you focused on your

business, instead of the reports.

As you read this e-book, you’re going to create an at-a-glance system that’ll let

you do this efficiently day-to-day. Web analytics can work that way, if you use it

right.

This system will work whether you’re in an e-commerce business or not. Here are

some examples:

A Business Analytics System: B2B

If you’re a purely business-to-business, lead-driven company, then your value

comes from leads.

Your growth opportunities come from expanded company reach (more people

finding you online), and from more, higher-quality visitors to your site.


A Business Analytics System: Charities

If you’re a charity and/or a non-profit, your value comes from funding and

grants, as well as subscribers and supporters you recruit online.

Your growth opportunities come from reach, much like B2B. But in this case,

you’re attracting potential donors.

A Business Analytics System: News

If you’re a news site or other publication, your value comes from pageviews you

can turn into advertising sales.

Growth results from additional readers who find their way to your site. Your

business improves when those potential readers look at more pages per visit and

spend more time on your site. It also improves when readers subscribe to your

site’s RSS feed or newsletter, or pass stories along to friends.


1. How to: Install Google Analytics

It’s easy! If you don’t have Google Analytics set up on your site yet,

this is where you start. Otherwise, skip ahead to Calculating &

Applying Value.


First step: If you don’t have a Google Account, get one.

1. Go to www.google.com/accounts

2. Click ‘Create an account now’:

3. Fill out the form. All done.


Next: Set up your Google Analytics account.

1. Go to www.google.com/analytics.

2. Click ‘Sign up Now’.

3. Log in using your Google Accounts password (you set that up on page 11).

4. Click ‘Sign Up’, and you’re ready to set up your first site.


Once you click ‘sign up’ you’ll see the form below:

You can track multiple sites in a single Google Analytics account. This form sets

up your first one.

For Website’s URL, enter the exact address of your site. That means, if your

site is at www.gibblegibbet.com, include the ‘www’. If your site address doesn’t

include ‘www’, use gibblegibbet.com. Account Name will automatically reflect

the site address. If you’re going to manage multiple sites, you might want to


change this to something you’ll recognize. Select your time zone and country, and

click ‘Continue’.

Finally, grab the code that Google Analytics provides and paste it into your web

site per their instructions. In about 24 hours, you’ll start seeing data. Woo hoo!

You’re off and running.


Resources: Google Analytics Install

A few resources you can use to help you install Google Analytics:

I did a video tutorial:

http://bit.ly/dh8zPs

And, of course, Google’s own tutorial ain’t bad:

http://bit.ly/9yTERy


2. Setting up and tracking goals

Every business web site has one or more goals: An action they’d

like every visitor to take. That action might be a purchase, or a vote,

or a simple, “Hmmm, that’s interesting”. Before you can start

applying value and measuring growth, you have to set up Google

Analytics to measure those goals.


Once you’ve got your Google Analytics account and code set up, setting up and

tracking goals is straightforward. You just need to know your business goals and

goal page for each one.

Figuring out your goal and goal page

A goal page is whatever page a visitor lands on after they’ve taken a desired

action.

If you sell online, your goal is a sale and the goal page is the ‘thank you for

your order’ page at the end of the checkout process.

If you’re building an e-mail list, your goal is a signup and the goal page is the

subscription confirmation.

If you’re generating leads, your goal is a lead and the goal page is whatever

shows up after a visitor clicks ‘submit’ on the sales request form.

If you run a publication, it gets a little trickier. A ‘goal’ may mean a visitor

reads more than 5 pages during their last visit. Luckily, Google Analytics

accounts for this. More in a moment.


Most businesses have multiple goals: An e-commerce company obviously wants

to build sales. But it also probably has a ‘special offers’ e-mail list. Building that

list is a goal in itself. Great customer support may be another goal, measured by

the number of people who indicate they are satisfied with the help they got.

You should be able to come up with 2-3 goals without much effort. Write down all

of the goals, first. These should be business goals, not necessarily specific pages

on your web site.

Once you have those, find the goal page that best tracks the business goal and

write that down, too.


Example: A membership site

I run a membership, subscription-based training site called the Fat Free Guide to

Internet Marketing. My goal: Get subscriptions! When someone decides to sign

up for the Fat Free Guide, they start on this page:


That’s not my goal page, though. The goal page is the ‘success’ page – it appears if

someone fills out the form on the ‘join’ page and then makes their first payment:

The address of my goal page is fatfreeguide.com/success/ - you can see that

in the screen capture above. I’ve got my goal and goal page. Now it’s time to set

them up in Google Analytics.


Setting up a page-based goal in Google Analytics

Once you have the goal page’s address (also called a URL, if you want to get geeky

about it) the rest is easy:

1. Log into Google Analytics.

2. Find the web site profile to which you want to add the goal.

3. Click Edit:

4. Under Goals, click Add Goal. Don’t let the form that appears scare you.

5. Enter a name you’ll remember for the goal name.

6. Set Active Goal to ‘on’.


7. Leave the Goal Position as-is for now. Goal position is strictly for

organization – you can move stuff around later if you need to.

8. Leave the goal type set to ‘URL destination’. That’s the goal page address

we just figured out in Figuring out your goal and goal page.

9. Under Goal Details, set the Match Type to Head Match.

10. For the Goal URL, type in everything but your web site address. If your

site is mysite.com, and your goal page is mysite.com/asf.html, then your

goal URL is /asf.html. In my case, the goal page address is a folder, so I

typed in /success/.

11. Enter the value of a single goal accomplished for the Goal Value. If you

don’t know it yet, don’t worry – we’re going to get very specific about it in

the next chapter. Just save the goal and move on.

Once you’re done, you should have something that looks like the image on the

next page:



Click Save Goal. All done! Within about 24 hours, you’ll start seeing goal data.

Google Analytics also has e-commerce tracking, which will record the value of each purchase, as well as the individual products purchased. I’m not going to go into that here. If you want to learn how to set it up, you can read Google’s documentation. It also has funnel tracking, which lets you track each step in a multi-step process like a shopping cart’s checkout. Again, don’t worry about this yet. It’ll be in a future e-book.


Setting up a non-page-based goal in Google Analytics

If you’re a publisher, your biggest ‘goal’ may be to generate pageviews. You sell

advertising based on those pageviews. In that case, every page on your site is a

theoretical goal page. Your real goal is to make sure visitors stay on the site for

more than n pageviews.

Google thought of that. Remember the ‘goal type’ field in goal setup? Change that

to ‘pages/visit’:


Now you get a whole different goal setup form:


Enter the number of pages you per visit you’d like to see. Click Save Goal and

you’re all set.

You can also track time on site. That’s useful if you’re running, say, a podcast, or

a chat room, or some other service where attendance is more important than

pageviews.


Lots of goals

There’s no end to the types of goals you can track. Anything you can measure as a

page view can become a goal and have a value attached to it. To start, keep it

simple. Remember: Avoid overload.

But later on, add as many goals as you want. You can have 4 sets of 5 goals each –

that’s 20 different things you can measure in a single web site profile. Good

marketing is all about testing. Take advantage of goal tracking to make testing

easy.


3. Calculating & Applying Value

Last chapter, you learned to set up goals. That’s great, but a goal,

when accomplished, delivers value. Value is real cash generated,

not ‘attention’ or ‘eyeballs’. If you can’t calculate value, goals data is

one more distracting bar chart.


Goal measurement as defined by Google Analytics gives a deceptive picture of

value. Say you run an e-commerce site and you know a customer will place an

average of 3 more orders after their first purchase. The value of whatever

generated that first purchase – and Adwords ad, or your SEO campaign, or

whatever else – is significantly higher than the purchase price.

So, the trick is figuring out just what the value of that goal really is. Then you

have to convert that to a value per click.

I can practically hear you flinching right now. Don’t panic! It’s just basic math:

value/click = customer value * lead conversion rate * click conversion rate

Here’s what all that stuff means:

Value/Click is just that: The dollar value of a single click to your web site. In

this context, a ‘click’ means ‘a visit’ - a person clicking an ad, or a search listing,

or a link in an e-mail, or some other link on the internet, and landing on your


site. You spend money to get those clicks. You should know what they’re worth to

you.

Note that I’m talking about ‘visits’, not ‘unique visitors’. We need to know what

those clicks are ultimately worth, whether 10 clicks are generated by 10 different

people or by one person. So we’re not using unique visitors to figure out value.

Customer value is the lifetime value of a single customer. If you don’t already

know this and are running a marketing campaign, now is a good time to figure it

out. You can’t conduct a smart internet marketing campaign (or run a business!)

without knowing this number. If you don’t know it, here’s a formula to get a

rough number you can work with:

customer value = value generated / traffic


Customer value: E-commerce

If you’re an e-commerce business, take total sales over the last 12 months and

divide by total unique visitors. So a site that got 10,000 unique visitors over a

year, and sold $10,000 worth of goods, has:

$10,000 total sales / 10,000 unique visitors = $1/customer

Why did I pick 1 year? Why not 6 months, or 6 years? 1 year should cover any seasonal fluctuations, while minimizing ‘noise’ from major changes to your business. When you collect this data, though, you must use common sense: Use sales and traffic data that will provide a clear picture of your current business.

Customer value: Lead generation

If your business is focused on lead generation, then you use your site to

generate leads, and turn those leads into customers after that. Replace unique

visitors with your actual, total customer count for the time period in question.


So, if you had a total of 1,000 customers over a year (including old customers you

kept), and generated $10,000 in sales, your customer value is:

$10,000 total sales / 1,000 customers = $10/customer

Customer value: Publishing

If your business is built around selling advertising (if you’re a publication, for

example), it gets a little trickier. In your case, one customer is actually one visit. You need to convert each customer to a unit of advertising. Assuming you sell ads

using a pageview model, use this formula:

cost per pageview for ads * pageviews per visit = visit (customer) value

Selling ads based on pageviews means you’re selling on a CPM (cost per thousand

pageviews) basis. Your cost per pageview is your CPM price divided by 1000. If


you are selling ads at $45 CPM, then your cost per pageview is $45/1000, or

$.045.

You can find pageviews per visit - the average number of pages a visitor looks at

in a single visit to your site - in your analytics software.

And, as a publication, your ‘customer’ is actually a reader. So we need to know the

average value of a reader when they come to your site.

So, if I have an online newspaper that generates 10 pageviews per visit, and I’m

selling ads for $45 CPM, my average customer value is:

$.045 * 10 pageviews/visit = $.45/visit


Customer value: Anything else

If your business model isn’t built around sales, leads or advertising, you’ll need to

do a bit of figuring to find the right customer value. Here are some hints:

If you’re a non-profit or a political campaign, dollar value is represented by

donations. “Customer” value is built around the donations made by individuals

during their relationship with your organization.

If you’re simply driving foot traffic to a restaurant, a movie theater or some other

brick-and-mortar business, dollar value is represented by each person that walks

in your door. There’s no easy way to tell which customer found you online and

which didn’t. So figure out the average value of any customer who walks in your

door by dividing total sales by total transactions.

If you’ve got a trickier one, please e-mail it to me at [email protected]. I’ll write a blog post about it and get you an answer. Plus you’ll help all the other folks who undoubtedly have the same question.


Now you know your customer value. That was the hard part. On to the two

conversion rate numbers.

Lead conversion rate

You only need lead conversion rate if you have multiple stages in your

conversion process. For example, if visitors to your site complete a request

information form, that converts them from visitors to prospects. You still need to

know how many of those prospects will become leads.

A prospect is someone who’s just gotten in touch with you for the first time. You

don’t know if they’re serious potential customers, filled out the form thinking it

was something else, or want to get a brochure but have no intention of buying.

A prospect only becomes a lead if, upon following up, you find out they really are

interested. They want a proposal, or more information about your product, or

have other questions. That site visitor has progressed from being just another

visitor to a real potential sale. They’re now a lead.


Lead conversion rate is the number of leads divided by the number of

prospects:

leads / prospects = lead conversion rate

If I receive 50 information requests from my web site, and 5 of those requests

pick up the phone when I call them and start a larger conversation with me about

my services or product, then my lead conversion rate is:

5 leads / 50 prospects = 10% lead conversion rate

If you are an e-commerce site, then your lead conversion rate is always 1. If

someone makes a purchase, they’ve jumped from visitor to sale in one step. There

is no intermediate step. The same goes for publications that sell advertising by

the pageview.


Click conversion rate

Click conversion rate is the number of site visitors who take the next step, or

convert from visitors to prospects or customers:

conversions / total visits = click conversion rate

If your site generates leads, then the click conversion rate is the number of people

who complete that information request form or call you directly from the web

site. If my site gets 10000 visits per year, and 100 of those visitors complete my

information request form, then my click conversion rate is 1%:

100 conversions / 10,000 total visits = 1%

Not sure which phone calls come from your internet marketing campaign? Use a separate phone number on your web site. That way you can track phone calls generated by the site.


If your site is an e-commerce site, your click conversion rate is total number of

orders divided by visits. So an online store with 10,000 visits and 100 orders has

a click conversion rate of 1%:

100 conversions / 10,000 total visits = 1%

If your site is a publication and your only goal is to acquire readers, then every

visit converts, so your click conversion rate is 1. If you need subscribers, then

calculate that, instead.

If your site is based on some other conversion, use the same formula, and substitute your own conversion: A donation, a whitepaper download, or something else.


Click value: An e-commerce site

Time to put it all together. Here’s an example using an e-commerce site:

Site gets 10,000 visitors per month.

100 of those visitors convert, for a click conversion rate of 1%, or .01

It’s an e-commerce site, so the lead conversion rate is 100%, or 1.

The average customer buys $20 worth of stuff per month, so:

Customer value = $20/month

value/click = .01 * 1 * $20

value/click = $.20

So, if this e-commerce site is yours, you can afford to spend some fraction of $.20

to get one visitor to your site. If you spend more than $.20, you’d better have a

good reason, because you’re losing money.


Click value: A business-to-business site

Another example, this time using a business-to-business lead generation site:

Site gets 5,000 visitors per month.

25 of those visitors become leads, by filling out a ‘request more information’

form. That’s a click conversion rate of .5%, or .005.

Of those 25 leads, 5 become clients, for a lead conversion rate of 20% or .2.

The average customer spends $12,000/year, or $1,000 per month:

Customer value = $1000/month

value/click = 1000* .2 * .005

value/click = $1

So, if this is your company, you can afford to spend some fraction of $1 to get one

visitor to your site. If you spend more than $1, you’d better have a good reason,

because you’re losing money.


oh, sure.mock the fudge.

Fudging it

Calculating value is critical to your campaign.

Analytics won’t give you much useful data if

you can’t figure this out.

However, there’s a chicken-and-egg problem.

If you don’t have analytics properly set up,

chances are you don’t know your click or

lead conversion rate.

But if you don’t know your click or lead

conversion rate, you can’t calculate value,

so you can’t set up analytics, which means

you can’t figure out your click or lead conversion rate...

Yikes.

Don’t panic - there’s a solution. It’s called ‘fudging it’.


You can get an approximate click value by tapping resources you’ve already got:

1. Ask your salespeople: How many leads or folks who enter the store buy?

An estimate is fine, and you can use that to get your click or lead

conversion rate.

2. What’s the average value of an offline customer? You can use that as a

starting point for average online customer value.

3. Gut instinct may work. If you’ve been running your own business for 10

years, you can probably pull a decent estimate of conversion rate and

customer value out of your experience.

It’s not as critical to have a perfect click value number as it is to start with some

click value number.

The moment you start getting data, you can adjust your assumptions.


Sample data

For the purposes of the rest of this book, assume that the average value of a single

click to Conversation Marketing (my blog, and the main example I’ll use) is $.50.

My blog earns money through advertising, by generating new business for

Portent Interactive (my company) and by helping to sell ebooks and such. I won’t

attach specific numbers to those, but keep those three basic goals in mind as I

move through the examples in the rest of this book.


Resources: Value Calculation

A few resources you can use to help calculate the value of a click:

A nice Google Spreadsheet that you can copy and then use:

http://bit.ly/clickworth

And, an oldie but a goodie - my old ‘What’s a click worth’ tool:

http://www.conversationmarketing.com/clickworth.html


4. Measuring and Building Growth

Time to apply all that cool stuff you just learned. In this section,

you’ll match value to specific sources, and tie them together with

goal measurement.


Phew. Value was a tough section. From here on, it gets easier: You know that

value is important. You’re tracking the goals that measure value. Now you have to

know how to track the data that will help you determine value.

But what to track? There are thousands of possible metrics.

Dang it, Ian, I thought you said you’d simplify things for me!!!!

I will. You need to track the things that drive or limit growth. Just track:

Traffic sources

Best-performing content on your site

Worst-performing content on your site

That’s it. Don’t overcomplicate it. You will, however, need to analyze it.

This section will take you through digging up the right data, and then help you

extract useful, actionable information from it.


Tracking content performance: A quick trick

In Calculating & Applying Value, we figured out how much one visitor’s worth.

Throughout this section, I’ll be talking about pageviews. So you need a way to tie

visitor value to pageview value.

You can figure out the value of a pageview by dividing the value/visit by

pageviews/visit to get value/pageview.

So, if Conversation Marketing visitors average 1.49 pageviews per visit, and are

worth $.50 per visit:

$.5/1.49 = $.33 per pageview


Tracking traffic sources

Traffic sources are known as referrers. They’re external sites that send visitors

to your site. In Google Analytics, you can find them under ‘Traffic Sources’:


Traffic sources are broken into several categories, but the ones I watch the most

are:

Referring Sites, which tells me non-search sites that are driving traffic to

me; and

Keywords, which tells me what search phrases folks use to find me via

search engines.


The other referring sources are useful, but you can explore them on your own. If

you’re suffering from analytics overload, stick to referring sites and keywords and

you’ll have plenty to work with.


Tracking traffic sources: Referring sites

The Referring Sites report tells you the top web sites that are driving traffic to

you. By default, it’ll show you:

Total visits from each referring site;

Pageviews/visit for visitors from those sites. That’s an important measure of

visit quality;

Average time spent on your site by visitors from those sites. That’s another

great quality metric;

The number of new visitors from each site; and

The bounce rate for those visitors.


Referring sites: An example

The report below is from the Google Analytics report for Conversation Marketing.

I get a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon: 6,589 visits in about 20 days. Pages/visit

are slightly below my site average of 1.49, and below the average for other

referring sites (1.47). Average time on site is only 53 seconds, far below the site

average of 1:13. But I also get a lot of new visitors: 93% of all StumbleUpon

visitors are new. That’s good – StumbleUpon is spreading the word.


Bounce rate is low (which is good). A bounce is any visitor who comes to my

site, looks at the page on which they landed, and then leaves without clicking to

any other site page. Bounces are, in most cases, a bad thing.

My site average bounce rate is 75%. The bounce rate from StumbleUpon, though,

is only 65%. That’s a nice improvement. So, StumbleUpon is bringing me a lot of

new visitors, and a lot of those new visitors stick around to read other posts and

articles. I like StumbleUpon, and it likes me!


There is no ‘good’ bounce rate, time on site or anything else. There are no absolute values for all web sites. If you want a ‘good’ bounce rate, find a way to reduce your current bounce rate. Now it’s ‘good’, compared to the old bounce rate.


Tracking traffic sources: Keywords

This is my favorite report. A lot of folks obsess about search engine rankings, but

really, who cares if I rank #1 for ‘hobbits’, if I get zero useful traffic from it?

I want to see the actual keywords and phrases that are sending me visitors. For

example, who could’ve predicted that I’d get traffic from people searching on

‘monster trucks’ and, in fact, ‘hobbits’?

The keywords report is your best indicator of what people are looking for when

they find you, and what they expect to see when they arrive on your site. This

report makes it pretty clear that a lot of folks come looking for me when they have

questions about social media.


They also tend to stop by when they want help with Google Analytics.

If I apply the same analysis as I did to referring sites, it’s pretty easy to see that:

‘Social media manager’ is a solid phrase, with high time on site, high

pageviews/visit and a low bounce rate.

‘Google analytics tutorial’ is a good one, too, plus it’s a more ‘niche’ phrase.

It’s easier to market to folks looking for ‘google analytics tutorial’ because it’s

nice and specific.

Maybe I should write an ebook about Google Analytics. Hmmmm...


‘Hobbits’ on the other hand, is just awful. Whatever folks were expecting when

they searched for ‘hobbits’, they sure didn’t find it on my site. They spent an

average of 3 seconds on my site, and 76% of them ‘bounced’.

But I’m curious. What page ranks for ‘hobbits’? This is where Google Analytics

really starts to shine. I’ll click the drop-down next to ‘Keyword’ and select another

dimension for my table:

For the second dimension, I’ll pick ‘Landing Page’:


Well, look at that. I actually wrote a post in 2008 that had ‘hobbits’ in the title.

That’s where folks are ending up when they find my site under a search for

‘hobbits’.

Doesn’t matter where I’m ranking, in this case, since the traffic is so low-quality it

has no purpose.

But, it gave me a chance to show you how you can cut across your data using

multiple dimensions. How cool is that?


You’ve got a lot of other options by using that second dimension:

You can split out your keyword traffic by search engine if you pick Source; look

at which cities or other locations are driving search traffic on a specific phrase; or

compare paid versus organic search traffic by selecting Medium.

Take a little time to click around. If you start to feel overwhelmed, though,

remember: The basic report is all you need to get started. Don’t think you

have to review all of these dimensions whenever you open Google Analytics.


By the way, when you use the keywords report, you can show only paid or non-

paid traffic by selecting the relevant option:


And, you can look at change in traffic over time for a specific keyword by clicking

that keyword. That’s helpful if you’re trying to decide on a change in strategy

around one phrase.

For example, this graph shows declining traffic for ‘google analytics tutorial’.

Maybe writing an e-book isn’t such a great idea.


Oh, and I just snuck in another Google Analytics feature. I changed the date

range for my report, and changed the graph points to months instead of days:


Improving growth using traffic sources: Examples

If you know which keywords and sites are generating the best quality visitors to

your site, you can improve growth by:

Spending money on pay-per-click advertising for specific keywords;

Carrying out a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign focused on those

keywords;

Buying advertising on sites that generate quality visitors;

Reducing investment in ads/sites/keywords that send a lot of traffic, but

generate little value;

Finding additional sites similar to existing, good traffic sources and getting

placement on them, too.


Tracking content performance

Enough with traffic sources. Time to look at content performance.

You use traffic sources to see which messages perform best when folks are

looking for you on other web sites. Use content performance to find the best-

performing messages on your own site.

I’m going to keep picking on the hobbits article. Given its awful performance with

search-driven traffic, I wonder if I should just delete that page from my site.

noooooo...


I need to figure out if this article is as poor a performer as it seems to be, or if it’s

only performing poorly when folks find it via a search for the word ‘hobbits’. To

do that:

I go to Content > Top Content:

But that shows me a whole bunch of pages, none of which are my hobbits article.

To fix that, I’ll use the Filter Page feature in Google Analytics. You’ll want to


make sure you remember this one: All I do is type in ‘hobbits’, since that’s one

word in the page URL. Then I click ‘Go’...


...and voila! There’s the page I was looking for.

Looking at it more carefully, I don’t think it deserves deletion. Across all

referrers, it performs OK. Not great, but OK: About 1 minute average time on

page, and it actually has a better bounce rate than the site average. So I’ll leave it

in place.

If I didn’t find the article using ‘Filter Page’, I could have switched to the ‘Content by title’ report and filtered there, instead.


Tracking content performance: Context matters

The hobbits article example is a very important lesson. Never, ever forget about

context. People clearly didn’t like the article when they found it based on a

search for the word ‘hobbits’. But can you blame them? They probably wanted

pictures of Frodo Baggins. Instead, they got an article about internet marketing.

If I had based my decision on that one context, I would have deleted an article

that performs pretty well. That would’ve been bad, since the article actually

performs OK.

you can say that again!


Finding high-performing content

Now, I’m going to look for the best-performing content on my site. ‘Best

performing’ can mean a lot of things:

1. If you’re running an e-commerce site, it usually means $ index. That’s the

value of a pageview on that page;

2. If you’re running a blog, then it may just mean average time on page, or

subscriptions from that page, or something else;

3. If you’re running a business, it may mean leads generated from that page.

You get the idea. I’m a blogger, so for me ‘good’ means ‘gets attention, acquires

fans, keeps my readers informed and entertained’. I’m not psychic, but I can look

at page views, average time on page, bounce rate and exit rate to see which pages

perform best.

To start, go back to the unfiltered ‘top content’ list.


Now, take a look at my top 9 pages by pageview. First thing I look at is the busiest

page: That’s an article called 22 Things You Don’t Know About Your Customers.

It’s a great performer - more pageviews than my home page; higher-than-average

time on page; lower-than-average bounce rate.

It does have a higher-than-average exit rate, but if folks read the whole article

and leave, I’m happy with that. If they liked what they read, they’ll be back.


I know what you’re thinking: So what? What can I do with this information? Lots.

I can write more articles like the 22 Things piece.

I can take each of the 22 things in that article and do a separate post about

each one.

I could even promote that article a little bit: Contact other bloggers and tell

them I’ve seen a lot of interest around this one post, or send an email to my

clients about it.

Or, I can take a totally different approach, expand the article into a longer

whitepaper or ebook, and then offer it to other sites as a link-building

exercise.

Most important, we’re going to eventually check how we can use good content to

get more high-value clicks and improve value.


Other ways to find ‘good’ content

There are other ways to track ‘good’ content:

Check which pages generate the most Adsense revenue, if you’re using

Adsense;

Look at which pages generate goal conversions, if you’re tracking goals (more

about that later);

If you want to really get fancy, you can use a tool like ClickTale or CrazyEgg

to track exactly how folks move around on each page, and then take that and

use it to figure out which pages are keeping attention where it belongs.


Improving growth by finding ‘good’ content: E-commerce

This ‘good content’ strategy really shines in e-commerce. If you’re running an

online store, you can:

Find the product pages that perform best and improve the call to action on

those pages, or compare them to other pages and improve those.

Track the non-product content that performs best, and link directly to

related products from those pages.

Use content performance data to determine which styles/colors/products

have the best potential.

Feature best-performing product pages on the home page, to further boost

their sales.

Combine high-performing products into sets.

And so on.


Finding and improving poor-performing content

Now it’s time to find the under-performing pages. Content may perform poorly

for a lot of reasons, including:

No one can find it;

Something’s wrong with the page, so it doesn’t display properly or doesn’t

display at all;

It contains outdated or incorrect information;

It’s just not what your audience wants.

Or, of course, it may perform poorly in one context but not in another. We

learned that in Tracking content performance: Context matters.

Finding underperforming content is a lot harder than finding the good stuff.

You can’t just look for pages with the least pageviews. A page that gets 2

pageviews but lands you $10,000 in sales could be a great performer.


Pages with high bounce rates but a low number of pageviews may look bad

because of one visitor who viewed and immediately left the page.

A page with a low $ index may be contributing to overall visitor interest, and

sending people to another page, where they immediately buy.

Go back to the top content report. Then sort by bounce rate, for starters.


Unfortunately, it’s not very helpful. I don’t care if I have a high bounce rate on

pages that get 1 pageview per month. I’d love to get more views to those pages,

but that’s a very difficult way to try and generate more value.

You’ll have to do a bit of digging to make sure you’ve got the right information.

Luckily, that gives me a chance to show you another cool feature in Google

Analytics: The advanced filter.

Here’s how you use an advanced filter.

1. At the bottom of the page, click Advanced Filter.

2. Select Metric >> Pageviews and set it to ‘greater than or equal to’. I

then use the average pageviews/page, which I get by dividing total

pageviews for the month by the number of pages: 63,692/1052 = 60. Not

scientific, but it works.

3. Click Add new condition.


4. Select Metric >> Pageviews and set this one to ‘average time on page’.

Set that to the average time on page as noted by Google Analytics in the

Top Content report. Note that Google’s advanced filter requires that you

enter the time in seconds, so you have to convert the minutes:seconds

notation to seconds. Annoying, but doable.

5. Click Apply Filter. Sort that report by bounce rate and you can see pages

that get decent traffic and a fair amount of attention but still cause most

visitors to ‘bounce’.

Sort the resulting report by bounce rate and you’ll have a great list of pages that:

Get a fair number of pageviews per month;


And solid average time on the page;

But are still causing visitors to bounce - they’re leaving your site without

taking any other action.

This is a huge opportunity. If you can improve those pages by:

Updating the content;

Adding a clear call to action that invites readers to do more;

Doing some conversion rate optimization on them.


…you can instantly add value. The report on the previous page showed my

Streaming Video article is a big opportunity: Lots of traffic, but a very high

bounce rate.

I’ve got plenty of options here. Readers spend six minutes on that page. I have

their attention.

If I want a quick win, I can try inserting an ad for one of my books on the page. I

could also add an invitation to contact me for a free initial consult. Or, I can set


up a uStream package for my company, and invite folks to buy it right from the

post.

Instant benefits. As long as whatever I try to do costs less than the value/click on

my site, I’m playing it very safe. Since all of the above options cost only time, this

page is a great opportunity for me to build value.


Final points about growth

Always remember that the value of a pageview expands the deeper you can draw

someone into your site, because every visitor’s click makes that visitor more likely

to stick around and view another page after that.

The changes I make may seem tiny - if I take a page that gets 1000 pageviews but

has a 95% bounce rate, and reduce the bounce rate to 60%, that means I’ll get at

least 300 more visitors clicking their way deeper into my site.

At $.33/pageview, that’s about $99. Whoopee.

But it adds up because each click increases the chance of the next. And, of course,

if I can make changes across 10 pages that have the same effect, I just added

$990. If I can make a change to an entire 100-page section that has the same

effect, I just added $9900. Get it?


5. What’s next


This little book gives you the tools to start productively using Google Analytics.

But Google’s reporting tool has a lot more power than I’ve shown you. You can:

Track unique events within any page or application;

Track form ‘bail out’ and optimize forms;

Segment your audience by demographics or behavior;

Generate automated alerts;

Optimize your shopping cart checkout process;

Access data via an API for your own custom tools.


Additional resources

If you want to learn more, have a look at a few sites:

ConversationMarketing.com – That’s me. I also have a Vimeo channel where I

put video tutorials on Google Analytics.

SEOMoz.org – A great resource for learning SEO and SEO-specific analytics

techniques.

Avinash Kaushik’s blog, Occam’s Razor – Avinash the the ‘it’ guy in analytics.

Read his blog to learn not just about Google Analytics, but analytics in general.

Justin Cotroni’s Analytics Talk – Packed with Google Analytics tips and tricks.


About Ian Lurie & Portent Interactive

Ian Lurie is an internet marketer and president of Portent Interactive. He started the company in 1995. Portent Interactive is a full-service internet marketing agency in Seattle, WA. Portent helps companies optimize:

Web site e-commerce and lead generation conversion rates;

Search engine rankings;

Paid search and overall online ad spend.

Portent’s clients include Advertising Age Magazine, AutoWeek, Princess and

Lucky Brand Jeans.


Other stuff by Ian Lurie

The Fat-Free Guide to SEO Copywriting

The Web Marketing All-In-One Desk Reference for Dummies

Conversation Marketing

The Fat Free Guide to Internet Marketing (subscription-based)


Contacting Ian Lurie

E-mail: [email protected]

Twitter: @portentint

Blog: www.ConversationMarketing.com

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the fat guide to google analytics