Search Engine Optimization in Google Analytics - Part 2

In my previous post I showed you how to set up ‘Web Master Tools data sharing’ in your Google Analytics account, in this post I give you more information about the three reports available under the Search Engine Optimization section.

Queries:  From the three reports provided we find this one the most useful. Within this report you can see metrics related to the web search queries that returned your page in the Google Search results.  The metrics include impressions, clicks, average position and CTR for the top 1,000 daily queries.  

The following are some ideas that might help you to have a better sense of how your site is performing in Google Search:

• The Queries report is very useful to help determining improvement of search queries after running a SEO audit and applying changes in your site, look at changes in average position and CTR.  
• As in any of the other reports in Google Analytics, you can compare different periods, i.e current month and last month and look at the performance of the search queries you are more interested in.  

• Compare impression and CTR to get ideas of how you could improve the content of your landing pages making them more relevant based on the search queries.
• Apply secondary dimensions to filter data for particular search queries.  For example, you could be interested to analyse search queries by country and by search properties (i.e image, Mobile smartphones, Mobile, Video or Web).

Landing Pages: Similar to the Queries report you are able to see the top landing pages by impressions, clicks, average position and CTR.  You can find that some of the pages don’t get a good CTR because the meta tags such as description, title and keywords are not configured or are not used effectively. 

Geographical Summary: Under this report we can see impressions, clicks and CTR by country and by Google search property.  

My advise is that you don’t use these reports trying to match information from Google Analytics with Web Master tools because they may differ.  The way how Webmaster Tools processes the data is different to Google Analytics; but it’s possible to find some similar trends in the number of clicks and visits. Also I guess they will differ more now that Google will no longer report the query terms the user searched on to reach your site when they are logged in with their google account.

 

Search Engine Optimization Reports in Google Analytics

A few months ago Google launched a pilot program to include data from Webmaster Tools in Analytics reports. Early last week the set of reports included in the program was released publicly. In case you haven’t noticed there’s a new set of reports called Search Engine Optimization under the Traffic Sources section in Google Analytics. You will need to set up Webmaster Tools data sharing to see the reports.  Enabling Webmaster tools data within Analytics is a simple process, and here are the steps you will have to follow.

1. Navigate to Traffic Sources > Search Engine Optimization

2. Click on any of the three reports available ‘Queries’, ‘Landing Pages’ or ‘Geographical Summary’.

If you haven’t set up webmaster tools data sharing previously you will see the following message.

3. Click on the button ‘Set up Webmaster Tools data sharing’, which will redirect you to the Web Property Settings tab.

4. Click ‘Edit’ under the Webmaster Tools Settings section

5. Select the site you want to associate to that particular web property id (UA-XXXXXX-Y) in your Google Analytics account and click save.

6. Once again you will be redirected to the Web Property Settings tab in Google Analytics where you can see the profiles selected and save the changes by clicking ‘Apply’.
Next thing to do is to enjoy your SEO reports in Google Analytics.

Social Engagement in Google Analytics

Google recently announced the introduction of Social Engagement reports in Google Analytics. The new reports allow you to see Google +1 metrics along with other types of social sharing actions that are occurring on your website.

Google +1 social engagement interactions are automatically tracked by default in Google Analytics. However, as you might know most websites use social button actions from other suppliers such as Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and LinkedIn. That’s why Google has provided a social plugin that allows us to track these additional social interactions.

By tracking social interactions in Google Analytics and using the Social Engagement reports you can gain more insights into your visitors’ behaviour.

The Social Engagement reports enable you to:
1. Compare visitor engagement metrics such as visits per page, time on site and bounce rate between your socially engage visitors and your regular (not socially engaged) website visitors.

2. Analyse goal conversion rate and percentage of e-commerce transactions generated by socially engaged visits.

3. Determine which social sources are preferred by your visitors. For example, most of your users might share your content via Twitter, rather than Facebook.

4. Compare which actions are the most common for a particular source. For example, users that are social engaged using Facebook; do they use the ‘like’ or ‘send’ option more often.

5. Calculate the percentage of socially engaged visits that reached the site through a social media link and then converted.  

6. Identify which content on your site is the most shared using the social actions and in which part (page) of your website these actions took place.

Most of you have been using event tracking to track social engagement interactions such as ‘like’, ’tweet’ and ’send’, among others. The method to track social interactions has a similar syntax to event tracking. The following is an example of the event method and how it should be changed using the track social method.

Before (using Event Tracking):


_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'facebook', 'like',document.location.href]);

After (using Social Interaction Tracking):

_gaq.push(['_trackSocial', 'facebook', 'like', document.location.href]);


This tracking should occur once the social interaction is completed. It is important to differentiate between social engagement actions and clicks on links that drive people to your social media sites. A link to your Twitter profile from your website should continue being measured as an outbound link while a piece of your content being Tweeted should be tracked as a social engagement action.

Google announced a new version of  Google Analytics the past 17 of March during the Google Analytics User Conference in San Francisco. This announcement concerns to all Google Analytics users and competitors.  The new version has been launched to provide more functionality, and improve the experience of people with the interface based on the feedback received from GA users around the world. This version not only offers more flexibility, simplicity, and speed, but also a better administration of accounts and profiles.

The next is a set of key features that you will see in the new Version:

1. Simplicity and Speed
• Quicker Navigation
• Easier and more intuitive interaction with elements
• Faster interface.
2. Flexibility/Usability
• Different type of custom reports
• Flat Table -> All data in a single table, analysing 1 to 2 dimension and many metrics at once.
• Explorer -> Current type of custom report in Ga where data is organized hierarchically based on the dimensions selected. Therefore, you have drill down in each dimension to see data
• Application of Custom Report Filters.  This gives us the opportunity to limit our report to a subset of data in a context.
• Term Cloud report for Referrals and Keywords data.
• Easier creation and application of Advanced Segments
• Possibility to add events as Goals.
3. Account Management
• Better search options to find profiles and accounts.
• Definition of assets under account settings management 

Based on the features listed above, I will keep posting articles with more detailed information.

Google AdWords announced changes in Display URL

If you are used to change the Display URL on your AdWords ad variations to get the attention of people searching for a specific term,  you might be interested to know that the AdWords team has decided to display the domain portion of the Display URL in lowercase for any ad variation.  Therefore, if you have ads where the Display URL contains capital letters, these will be shown all in lowercase.

I’m going to take a well-known example from the AdWords Youtube video: Better ad texts, better performance!  

Within this video the recommendation to stand out is to

• Use more popular keywords in your ad text
• Include Special offers or unique selling point
• Include Call to actions, and
• Enter capitalization of the ad text 

This is the example of the ad suggested

 

According to the recent AdWords announcement, such ad would appear as this in the next week or so.

 

The change will apply also to Display URLs that contain subdomains. For example, if we have Canon.CameraShopSite.com, it will appear as canon.camerashopsite.com

The good news is that the portion corresponding to sub-directories can still be capitalized and use dynamic keyword insertion. For instance, if we have Canon.CameraShopSite.com/Digital-Camera, it will appear as canon.camerashopsite.com/Digital-Camera

Additionally, we don’t have to make any changes in our ad variations to reflect the new change because they will automatically be changed.

The bad news is that if you have don’t have additional information in your Display URL different to the domain (e.g www.site.com) you destination URL will look plain compared to other ads that use additional keywords within the destination URL (e.g www.site.com/Keywordsearched)

Apparently the purpose of this new restriction is to push people to use website testing to test variations of the landing pages and website in general.  In order words, use Google Website Optimizer to test and measure success.

My advise, keep an eye on the performance of your ad variations during the next few weeks. If you see a negative impact on your campaigns, create new ad variations keeping in mind the restrictions for capitalization under the destination URL and of course use website optimizer tools to improve the performance of your landing pages.

In-Page Analytics

Before, we had the site overlay report in Google Analytics. This report displayed the percentage of clicks, transactions and goals for standard links within a page. The past 15 of October, the site overlay report was replaced in GA with then new In-page Analytics. The site overlay report was a great tool to do click density analysis and was very useful for those who had to do analysis of websites that rarely use. In other words it was great to facilitate the work of agencies who have to analyse data from different customers. However, the report was missing lots of features. Google has improved Site overlay in different ways helping out people to understand two things: the performance of a page better and how visitors are using the page in a website.

The main reason for using In - page Analytics is to keep the visual context that can not be kept when using the navigation report. My recommendation is:

• Look at the link with bigger percentage of clicks, this percentage is displayed inside bubbles .After you have done that, look at the statistic information that these links are giving you. For instance, percentage of transactions, revenue, goal value and number of goals completed.

• Ask yourself if the links most people are clicking are the links you want that people actually click on. Believe me, you can find surprises (like most of your visitors clicking on the help tab or in a link you never thought).

NOTE: When doing your analysis be careful with some things within the In-page report. If you see dotted bubbles , it means that the page has more than one link to the same url. In-page Analytics makes easier to identify where are the other links to the same destination highlighting (in gray) them when you look at the statistic information of the dotted bubbled.

• Follow the links to see what people do after they reach the next page. One of the greatest features added to this report is that in the left side of the report you can see not only the content details stats for that page, but also the list of inbound and outbound sources. Therefore, you are able to know from where the visitors have been driven to this page and where are they going after.

You could also check out traffic information filtering by visitor type, city, region, referrals, campaigns and technical data as well. And if the filters are not enough, you can apply advanced segments to this report. What is this useful for? Let’s say that you send an email campaign promoting a specific product. You could compare referrals from that campaign with the rest of the visitors and check if the behaviour is similar or not.

Personally, I think the In-page Analytics reports is a great feature, but it’s not perfect. You need to be careful with dynamic links or buttons within a form which the information is not displayed in this report. Therefore do not make assumptions about the performance of your forms using this feature.

Also, it will be very useful to see where people are clicking even when there’s not a link present. This is very useful to identify when images are confused with links and will give you powerful tools to improve the performance of your landing pages. So, enjoy playing with the In-page Analytics and take the most of it as it is at the moment.

Gold Medal to Custom Variables

On this occasion I have to give the gold medal to Custom Variables, yes, I've been using Custom Variables in Google Analytics since October last year. I can honestly say they have been the solution to almost every problem (and the answer for every excuse presented to me for not using Google Analytics). Most importantly, after implementing the solution and trying it, they are happy with the results!

Usually I would talk about the coding and the implementation in detail but this time I just want to list and expand on ideas for using custom variables as a solution for some of your needs.

1. First and Last Click Attribution

By default Google Analytics presents the source and medium of the conversion based on the last click that generated the conversion. However, many clients want to know which one was the final touch point that generated the purchase, enrolment, download, etc.. Using custom variables at visitor level we can obtain such information.

Imagine you have different campaigns (not only AdWords campaigns) for a specific product. If visitors come to your site for the first time as a result of an email campaign, you could set two Custom Variables; CVSource and CVMedium. To make this work you will need to add a piece of code to check if the Custom Variable is set or not. If the CVSource and CVMedium are undefined you will need to set them, otherwise don't do anything.

Now suppose a visitor has spent some time on your site but he/she doesn't complete the goal e.g buy the product. Then a few days later, the same visitor comes to your site from a link posted on Twitter and this time he/she completes the purchase. In a normal scenario you would see the purchase came from Twitter which is true but you want to know which campaign generated his/her first visit and maybe analyse why the first one didn't work whereas the second source did?

Using Custom Variables and the technique I outlined above (remember no excuses) you can determine which initial touchpoint started the momentum toward the final conversion. You don't have to give 100% of the credit for the conversion to the last source, you can split it between the first and last source to see which is better and how the campaigns work together.

2. Sections - Categories

Sometimes you have different content to present to visitors and different goals classified by categories in your website. These categories could be presented as part of the menu, lists, sub-menu, etc. You could then set Custom Variables for a session level or in some cases for a visitor level. As a result you can identify the category that has been visited most much more easily than filtering by content in your content report in Google Analytics. This also allows you to check which categories are driving more visitor to complete a particular goal and which ones are the most effective for converting or completing goals.

3. Segmentation by Type of Information

3.1 Demographic

Many sites use forms to collect information required for purchasing products or services. Awareness of trends in the market and understanding customer/client needs are important to targeting the right audience at the right time with a campaign to promote a product or service.

Imagine your marketing team has created two new ads; one targeting young females and the other targeting families. If the customer already has a login and has previously entered information such as age, gender, income and occupation this makes it easy to segment them and target the ads.

3.2 Location

Not all the classifications defined for a location are available by default in Google Analytics because they are not standard for each country. You can see your reports segmented by ontinent, Country/Territory, Sub Continent Region and City but what if you would like to see that information classified by State/Province or by smaller locations inside the City e.g. by suburb. Use Custom Variables! It's up to you to find creative ways of capturing the specific locations your visitors are coming from but if you can access that data you can assign that value to your Custom Variable in a visitor or session scope.

4. Comments and Rating

If you have implemented a plugin or tool to add comments to your articles for example in a blog or rating a product or service. You could use Custom Variables to see how many commentators rate your product, service or blog post 'good' or 'bad'.

Let's say you set a Custom Variable call Ratings_Feedback with two values 'Good' or 'Bad'. Then, each time someone rates a particular element in your website the value will be stored in the Custom Variable. You can then look at your reports and find out: how many ratings you have; how many visitors out of the total using the plugin tool; and how many rate a specific product or service as 'good' or 'bad' etc.

I have found using Custom Variables very interesting and effective for all sorts of challenges, and great for insights into using the e-commerce tracking code and/or event tracking. My final suggestion, before you start implementing Custom Variables across your site is to analyse your needs very carefully. Try to find if you can get the data you want to see with the default dimensions and metrics provided by the UI.

If it is not possible to do it with the standard tracking code, e-commerce tracking code, virtual pageviews and/or event tracking, then take time to define and design the use of the Custom Variable. By following my advice (remember no excuses) you are sure to get the right information you need to segment and analyse your data for great results!

I hope sharing my ideas for using Custom Variables will help you experience the benefits of this excellent feature provided by Google Analytics, and of course make your reports easier, more effective and more impressive!