Did you know this data is available? Many don't!

In a couple of recent consulting workshops with our members, I've recommended this report Google Analytics report (shown below), but the marketing managers I was working with were unaware of it and, more to the point, they thought they were really useful. I find similar in training workshops too.

What is this data and why is it useful?

The chart shows that you can see the Male / Female breakdown for your site visitors and you can also see the age breakdown too. It's useful for both B2B and B2C. It becomes more interesting when you compare it to the profile of traditional customers acquired by other channels - this prompts questions as to whether you are reaching new audiences online or similar audiences. The data…

A review of the in-page Chrome extension for Google Analytics Value: [rating=3] Recommended link: Google Analytics InPage Extension for Chrome This tool came out at the end of June, so it’s not brand new, but we think it’s still worth an alert since although it has been released for a month, it’s had fewer than 60,000 downloads - not many considering the number of people that use Google Analytics… Maybe this is because it doesn’t add much to the existing Google Analytics In-Page Analytics feature which you access from the bottom of the “Behaviour” menu in Google Analytics.

How to setup the Page Analytics Chrome extension

To setup the tool simply: Download the Chrome extension and enable the extension by clicking on the button in your toolbar. Make sure you are signed-in with the relevant Google Analytics account with a profile for the site you want to review. Load up the page you want…

New new customer acquisition reports give quicker, more useful reports

Value: [rating=4]

Recommended link: Google Analytics blog - Act, Empower, Access

It’s now over two years since Google last made a major update to its interface and report when it launched (version 5) in Beta as described in Dan Barker’s post. Since then, there have been regular updates and we have highlighted the most important in our Google Analytics updates channel. This new update is one of the more significant and useful - definitely worth an alert.

Google always has interesting announcements on major updates at its annual partners conference. This year, it’s focusing less on new technology as it did with last year’s announcements about Universal Analytics. Rather it’s tackling the “elephant in the room” for analytics which is the relative lack of use of analytics…

An example showing how to set up an AB test on Wordpress

What is A/B testing?

You'll probably be aware of the approach, I'm sure. A/B testing, also called split testing, involves your site serving  one of several versions of a page to show to a site visitor. The aim is to usually find a better approach to converting your visitors. [caption id="attachment_344" align="aligncenter" width="300"] What is A/B Testing?[/caption]

Why do you need it?

Put simply, how do you know if the changes you made to a page are working better than the earlier version unless you can compare them side by side? A/B testing allows you to make changes from a position of intelligence - knowing the impact of the changes you make allows you to learn what works and what doesn't, and make sure that you repeat the successes and not the failures.

A/B testing in WordPress

My…

Examples of how to use the new widget, event and mobile segmentation features

Google Analytics 'Realtime' features launched almost 2 years ago, and brought plenty of practical benefits to tool. For example, see these 5 ways to use Google Analytics Realtime  from the excellent Helen Birch. The set of Realtime tools has now been updated with some very useful extras. Here are my 3 favourite updates, and a couple of reasons you may choose to use them: Realtime Dashboard Widgets. Realtime Event Reports. Realtime Segmentation by Desktop / Mobile / Tablet. Here are some screengrabs and notes on each of the changes:

New Feature 1. Realtime Dashboard Widgets:

Google have added ‘realtime’ widgets to dashboards. The tool to add those looks like this: Here’s how they look within the dashboard: (minor note: ‘dimensions’ aren’t yet working for me there. I presume they’re fixing this)

New Feature…

What is the objective of your SEO program? Actually you will have many but at the heart will be the desire to increase the amount of relevant traffic that hits your website(s) from natural search. The total number of potential keyword searches that could drive traffic to your website is enormous. Some web owners get traffic from hundreds of thousands of different keywords. However, not every keyword delivers high quality traffic that adds value to the bottom line of the business. One of the biggest challenges for SEO is to learn which keywords are contributing to ROI, focusing efforts where they can deliver the most reward. To achieve this you need to separate the wheat from the chaff and that means using the data available to discover what doesn’t work. This article takes a look at some of the techniques you can use to identify and screen poor performing keywords, enabling you to…

A custom dashboard in Google Analytics you can use for checking your checkout process

If you have an ecommerce web site you know that the performance of the checkout is critical. If anything goes wrong with the checkout it will be costing you money. That’s why first thing every morning, before I even look at the sales figures, I look at my clients' ‘Checkout’ custom dashboards. It gives me an instant health check. I can clearly see if something has gone wrong with any of the stages in the checkout, such as the payment gateway or the address lookup system. Or if something is wrong with a promotional offer codes and people who use it are unable to buy… All I have to do is to take a quick look at this…

Over the last few months we’ve seen the new Google Analytics platform (v5) build momentum with a string of new feature releases, and last week it was the turn of real-time reporting to be included as the latest addition to the family. In my previous role with an analytics vendor, I would often have clients come to me with “Real-time data” on their list of requirements but in reality very few were in a position to be able make actionable decisions based on the data that quickly; to a greater extent that is still the case today. As analysts we struggle already to make the best use of the vast quantities of data we already have. Would increasing that with real-time reports across the system only exasperate that? In certain situations real-time data can be a very powerful tool in the analyst’s kitbag. I’ve been testing the real-time reports for a few…

If you use Google Analytics, and your site gets any traffic from search engines, you will love the latest feature they've just added, which was announced on the Webmaster Tools Blog on 4th October. Here are the stats you used to get when looking at a 'Search Engine Keywords' report: keyword number of visits pages per visit average time on site % new visits bounce rate So, you could see that you had (say) 50,000 visits for the word 'laptops', but you were left asking questions like "so what?", "is that good, or bad?", and left looking at other tools to try and answer those questions.

So What's New?

Now, here is one of the new 'Search Engine Optimisation: Queries' reports: I've highlighted the exciting bits there: The red circles are new pieces of data they've added (from 'Webmaster Tools') The pink arrows point to a single example of an instantly actionable piece of…

A case study and examples of reviewing content marketing effectiveness in Google Analytics

In our 2 previous posts on selecting the best KPIs for reviewing content marketing effectiveness we looked at the best types of measures to use. In this post, I get into the details of how to check some of these KPIs in Google Analytics and in particular to show your efforts in creating content impact leads or sales. Remember that we need to isolate the effect of particular content you have invested in in creating incremental leads or sales. To help do this, it's best if your site structure is setup right to measure effectively - I use the engineering term DFA "Design for Analysis" to prompt site designers think about this. I'll take some examples from ClickThrough Marketing who I have helped provide content for - around a year ago we created a series of printed 101…