You Need This Tracking for an E-commerce Business

If you have an e-commerce business, it’s critical to measure each transaction and how they correlate to your online marketing efforts. Yes, it’s important to measure conversions on your website, but measuring the revenue associated with those conversions is much more valuable.

One way you can measure e-commerce transactions is via Google Analytics. Google’s E-commerce Tracking will measure:

• Revenue associated with AdWords campaigns
• Revenue associated with specific referrals
• The number of transactions associated with organic search
• Average per visit value across all traffic sources

You can gain further insights such as understanding how long the decision making process takes for your customers along with how many website visits it takes to entice them to make a purchase.

It doesn't take much effort to enable e-commerce tracking, especially considering the tangible revenue reporting you will have access to. You can then obtain even more powerful reporting by tying this data to your multi-channel funnel reporting.

How are you currently gauging the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts in relation to your e-commerce transactions?

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Understanding the Relationship Between Various Marketing Channels

In a previous blog post, we covered the value in multi-channel funnels reports. Digging in deeper into the value of this type of reporting, let’s look at the types of channels and insights that are leveraged in these reports.

You can think of this type of reporting similar to how a basketball team works together. Sure we all know who made the winning shot, but think about how that winning shot would’ve never happened if his teammate didn’t make the perfect pass to him. Each team member plays a part in their victory. Similarly, a channel can play the role of first interaction, assist interaction and last interaction in multi-channels funnels reporting.

The various channels that are captured in these reports include, but are not limited to:

• paid and organic search (on all search engines along with the specific keywords searched)
• referral sites
• affiliates
• social networks
• email newsletters
• custom campaigns that you’ve created, including offline campaigns that send traffic to vanity URLs

Reporting occurs during the 30 days that led up to each conversion and transaction. Understanding the relationship between each channel will give you the intelligence you need to help define your most valuable marketing efforts.

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The Value in Multi-Channel Funnels Reports

Marketers often tend to attribute conversions to the last interaction a customer had with a marketing channel. However, looking at it from this perspective doesn’t really give us the complete picture.

Are you currently leveraging the insights Google Analytics has to offer? As part of this product, there is a suite of valuable multi-channel funnels reports. Although this isn’t a new feature, you may find that it is underutilized by many. The purpose of these reports is to give you a comprehensive overview of the steps your customers take from inception through to conversion.

Within these five multi-channel funnels reports, you can analysis data and important insights that would have otherwise been missed. Rather than just attributing credit to the last interaction, you can now identify which marketing channels initiate, which assist and which complete conversions.

This type of reporting can provide critical data for your marketing decisions. For example, imagine if you didn’t know that although your display advertising doesn’t provide as many conversions as you would like, it is involved in over 90% of conversion assists. Without knowing a key statistic such as this, the display channel may have been undervalued in the overall conversion process.

Watch this video to learn more about multi-channel funnels.



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Time To Get Creative with Google Analytics Remarketing

You may already be familiar with the fact that you can make your Remarketing more powerful via Google Analytics, but it’s time to take it a step further and get really creative with this advertising method.

Depending on your business, you can slice and dice your Analytics data in numerous ways to utilize these insights via different lists. Aside from “loyalty discount” lists, another viable targeting option is – social media users. Because Analytics allows you to segment by source, you can target a list of visitors from social media sites with ad messaging tailored specifically to them. These types of users most likely reached your website via a link from someone they trust and are connected to, so they may naturally have a bit more trust in your brand as a result.

Think about how you can craft ads that truly resonates with them. How would you speak to these users compared to users who found your site by clicking through on a pay per click ad? Remember, they already have shown interest in something that you had to say or offer. Take this opportunity to answer their interest by showing them meaningful ads.

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Make Your Remarketing More Powerful via Google Analytics

Google Remarketing has proven to be a lucrative tactic for many advertisers. The product is continuously improved upon such as being able to target Similar Audiences, adding to your ability to identify and gain new customers.

Are you looking for a way to hone in even further on your target audience? Let me introduce you to Google Remarketing via Analytics.

This Remarketing method allows you to tap into your website’s metrics to show targeted ads for what your visitors are looking for. For example, if you want to target people who have visited your website more than three times in the past 7 days and purchased $300 of product – you can. In this case, it may make sense to remarket to them with a “loyalty discount”.

You will need to do a quick integration between your Google Analytics and Google AdWords accounts to take advantage of this feature. There is also a necessary small update to the Analytics code snippet.

Remarketing via Analytics allows for sophisticated targeting using rich insights while broadening your reach.

What opportunities do you see for energizing your Remarketing campaigns with this product?

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Google Analytics Change History Feature

Similar to the Google AdWords Change History tool, Analytics is rolling out with its own version over the next few weeks. Exclusively for users who have administrative access, the tool lists:

• Date column: The date and time of the activity

• Email column: Which Analytics user performed the activity

• Activity column: The Analytics object (e.g., account, user, profile, goal, filter), and what activity was performed on the object (e.g., added to account, created, deleted)

The days of mystery in trying to figure out who changed what within your account are long gone. For companies who have more than one person accessing their account (e.g., other employees or outside agencies), you now have the necessary tool for complete accountability. This log will maintain a record of activities within the account for the last 180 days.

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Update Your Google Analytics Code and Enjoy Some Added Benefits

Last December, Google updated their Analytics code to the new and improved "asynchronous tracking code" with some added benefits, including faster tracking code load times, improved accuracy, and the elimination of tracking errors caused when JavaScript doesn't fully load. It also simplifies the ability to track multiple subdomains within a single profile. This is reason enough to update you code.

As of a few weeks ago, there is added incentive to updating your code. You can now use the new asynchronous code to save time with other Google products, such as Google Webmaster Tools. In the past, you would have to generate code to track web analytics and insert it on your webpages. In order to verify site ownership in your Google Webmaster Tools account, you would have to add an additional line of code to your website. Seems like a wasted effort. Not anymore, though. You can now save yourself a step and use your Google Analytics tracking code to verify your Webmaster Tools account.

If you haven't already updated to the new asynchronous tracking code, here's how:

1. Remove all existing code from your website first. If any of the old code remains, it will likely skew your data.
   
2. Copy the new code from your Profile Settings screen in Google Analytics by clicking on the "Edit" button in the Analytics settings, then clicking the "Check Status" link.
3. Paste the new code in the section of each page of your website you want to track. Specifically, the code should be the last thing before the tag. Note that the old Analytics code resided in the section. Not anymore.

URL Destination Goal Tracking in Google Analytics

Google Analytics offers three types of goals you can setup to track what visitors do on your site. For today’s post I’m going to focus on URL Destination goals. A URL Destination goal lets you specify a page with its “own URL” as a goal.

Google Analytics offers three different match types for URL Destination Goals. You will be able to determine which one to use based on how your site was built:

1. Exact Match: An exact match is a match on every exact character in your URL without exception from beginning to end. Use this when your URLs for your site are easy to read and do not vary.
   For example, if your goal is http://www.domain.com/shopping/thanks.html, enter /shopping/thanks.html as your goal.
2. Head Match: A head match matches identical characters starting from the beginning of the string up to and including the last character in the string you specify. Use this option when your page URLs are generally unvarying but when they include additional parameters at the end that you want to exclude.
   For example, a URL visited by a particular visitor might be http://www.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&id=9982251615. In this case, the id varies for every other user. You could still match this page by using http://www.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1 as the URL and selecting Head Match as your Match Type.
3. Regular Expression Match: A regular expression uses special characters to enable wildcard and flexible matching. This is useful when the stem, trailing parameters, or both, can vary in the URLs for the same website page.
   For example, if a user could be coming from one of many subdomains, and your URLs use session identifiers, you could use a regular expressions to define the constant element of your URL. For example, checkout.cgi\?page=1 will match http://sports.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&id=002 as well as http://fishing.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&language=fr&id=119

One of the three match types listed above will offer you a solution to setting up a goal to track a URL. Remember, the page you’re tracking can be static, dynamic, or even on a subdomain.

InternetMarketingClub.org Presents Ten Steps for Analyzing Website Traffic with Analytics

Join Marc Purtell and Stuart Smith of the SEM/SEO team of TenGoldenRules.com as they present, “Ten Steps for Analyzing Website Traffic with Analytics.”

This presentation will explain the following topics:

• Setting up a Google Analytics account
• Setting up Google Analytics tracking on your website
• Understanding critical metrics such as Exit Rate, Bounce Rate and Traffic Source
• How to use analytics to improve website performance and identify trends
• Advanced tools such as Actions and detailed reporting

This free webinar will take place on Wednesday, April 21, 2010 12:30pmEST – 1:30pmEST. To register and for more information please visit: Ten Steps for Analyzing Website Traffic with Analytics

Setting up a Funnel in Google Analytics

You’ve built the perfect website for your business. You’ve spent countless hours mapping out and creating the perfect paths for your customers to find the “pot of gold”. What happens if the paths you’ve created are not so perfect? How do you know where the barriers are in the paths you created? Google Analytics provides a tool called funnels to help you find the barriers.

Funnel tracking is used to measure how effective a path is at leading a customer down the process of completing a goal. A goal can be a sale, or a signup, or even a download of a UVP (unique value proposition).

The funnel is going to provide you with detailed information on where in the path the problems occur. You will be able to track your visitors from point A to when they leave the site. Based on the funnel analysis you can tweak your paths and pages to get a higher number of visitors converting the goals you’ve setup.

Google provides great instructions on how to setup a funnel . You will need to have at least one goal defined in order to setup the funnel tracking.

“After you've entered your goal information, define a funnel if you've selected a 'URL Destination' goal type:

1. Click 'Yes, create a funnel for this goal.'

2. Enter the 'URL' of the first page of your conversion funnel. This page should be a page that is common to all users working their way towards your goal. For example, if you are tracking user flow through your checkout pages, do not include a product page as a step in your funnel. Please note: Funnel URLs are treated as regular expressions. For this reason, you can include wildcard characters and use other regular expression methods if you want to match more than a single URL. Learn more about regular expressions.

3. Enter a 'Name' for this step.

4. If this step is a 'Required step' in the conversion process, select the checkbox to the right of the step. If this checkbox is selected, users reaching your goal page without travelling through this funnel page will not be counted as conversions. Learn more about the 'Required Step' option in a funnel.

5. Continue entering goal steps until your funnel has been completely defined. You may enter up to 10 funnel steps, or as few as a single step.

6. Click Save Changes to create this Goal and funnel, or Cancel to exit without saving."

As you can see setting up funnel tracking is a must if you want to improve your sites performance at converting the goals of your site. The funnel process is easy to setup and an excellent way to find the barriers in the paths you’ve created. Once the funnels are setup you’ll be on your way to a higher conversion rate.

Ego – The perfect iPhone App for the Account Executive

I’m in love with the latest app Ego , I’ve downloaded for my iPhone. I cannot tell you how many times I whip out my phone when I’m patiently waiting…red lights, bank lines, picking up takeout, grocery shopping, and the list goes on and on. I’m typically on my iPhone checking Facebook or iTunes for the latest and greatest.

With Ego, I now have the ability to get a snapshot of how my clients are doing using my phone. I do not have to visit multiple sites, logging in and out, to access the data. I’m now able to quickly view the number of visits to each of their websites (including daily, hourly, and monthly numbers), feed subscriptions totals and changes, and how many people are following each of my clients on Twitter.

The app currently provides statistics for Ember, Feedburner, Google Analytics, Mint, Squarespace, Twitter, and Vimeo. I would love to see Facebook, YouTube and FourSquare added to the list. It would also be great if they provided a deeper-dive into Google Analytics.

So the next time you see me picking up a pizza pie for the family know I’m also scanning my client’s analytics for the latest. How’s that for multi-tasking?

Balancing SEO and Usability

There is a thin line between optimizing a website for search engines and optimizing it for users. In order to get the content and keywords onto a page that are necessary to boost search engine rankings, it is often the case that usability is compromised. If your page is totally optimized for search engines, but compromises usability, you may be able to drive a lot of traffic to the page, but only convert a small amount of it. On the other hand, if you optimize the page only for usability, leaving off loads of content, you may be able to better convert the traffic that comes, but there will be far less traffic.

A good way to find the best balance is analyzing your analytics. In Google Analytics, for example, you can set up goals used to track conversion on the website. Test your goals on different pages. Optimize a page for search engines and track conversions on that page. Optimize another page for the users and track the same conversions on that page, but as a separate goal. This will let you see if you generate more conversions from the search engine optimized page, which should generate a high amount of traffic with a low conversion rate, or from the user optimized page that should generate a smaller amount of traffic but a higher conversion rate.

Free Internet Marketing Tools featured in a short Snippet of eBay Live Presentation

eBay Live 2008 Chicago Presentation Video featuring Free Internet Marketing Tools

- Bounce Rate Calculation
- Google Trends
- Landing Pages and Conversion Strategies
- Optimizer
- Google Analytics
- Google Page Rank
- SEO Quake

Big thank you to Drew McGriffin!