Google Analytics

Google Analytics Social Reports Now Available in Australia

Plus a Free Custom Social Dashboard

The new social reports in Google Analytics announced over a month ago are now finally available to Australian users.

The graphic design of the Google Analytics interface has also had a minor facelift.

Learn more...

Custom Social Reports for Google Analytics

While Google will soon be introducing Social reports in Google Analytics, there are still a few alternative ways to get your social data using Advanced Segments and Custom Reports.

The easiest way is to create an Advanced Segment that lists all the various social media sites. Don’t worry I’ve done it for you, so all you have to do is click the link and add it to your Google Analytics profile.

Advanced Segment Social Media Report

https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?type=advanced_segment&uid=5VoAhcfVStaFQkEtO-EuOg

However, if you want to create one yourself, here’s how.

Google Analytics Site Performance Dashboard

 - a custom dashboard to see how fast your site performs

If you’ve read previous posts in this blog you’ll know that you can lose a customer in less time than it takes to blink. These posts detailed the work Microsoft, Google and others have done on the effect of slow loading sites on sales, registrations and conversions.

Blink and You’ll Lose a Customer

Slow Sites Will Kill Your Sales

55% of Shoppers Abandon Poor Performing Sites

So the evidence is quite compelling about the efect of speed on sales.

But how do you find out how well your own site is performing?

Where to Find the Report in Google Analytics

This custom report will give you an instant overview of how well your site is performing speed wise read on...

Finding Your Most Effective Content and Best Referrers

How to See Referring Pages in Google Analytics and How to Interpret it

One of the annoying omissions in Google Analytics is that you can’t see the actual page that referred traffic to your site; you can only see the website domain.

Seeing the actual page can be useful as you can check it out and analyse what on the actual page caused people to be interested enough to click thru to your site. Was it the context of the page, story, an interesting image etc?

In knowing so, you can then try and create more content around that topic.

EG: If you post to Linkedin groups, knowing which group is sending you the most traffic is of obvious benefit. It means you can target more content to that group and decide to interact more with members of that group.

Also, if there is strong interest then there may be opportunities to follow up leads and potential business.

Thankfully it is relatively simple to set up a filter to give you this information.

If you haven’t done filters before, relax, this is one of the simpler ones.

Read on...

Where Your Online Business Comes From

Google Analytics recently sent me an email detailing where most people's traffic comes from.

The results were based on performance benchmarks for all their clients who subscribe to their anonymous benchmarking service.

According to Google, search engines and direct traffic (bookmarks or direct typing of a web address) make up the bulk of most businesses' traffic sources, followed by referrals and other sources.

Read more...

Why Google Analytics is Important for Business

A great infographic to help all business owners get some clarity around the torrent of data spewed out by most analytics solutions.

David McCandless from Information is Beautiful has put forth this rather elegant illustration that shows how to sort out your analytics data mountain.

The key points for me are that at the bottom is just data, which is what countless programs and services spit out for us these days.

In order to turn that data into anything useful we have to put some thought and considred design into it.

Only then can we uncover the knowledge buried within the data and start to develop some wisdom.

Or to put it anhother way, just automatically installing Google Analytics and looking at the reports once in awhile is not enough.

To get real value out of it, you need to do some brain work.

If Google Analytics is Free, Why Does it Cost So Much?

"Google Analytics is not free. It costs $10k. You pay that amount to a competent consultant to implement it and train your company. And you also have to follow my 10/90 rule and invest $10k times 90 in a competent Analyst."

Leading web analytics expert, Avinash Kaushik

Lately there's been a fair bit of discussion about what Google Analytics actually costs.

Many people have been quite surprised about what a proper implemtation of Google Analytics really costs, or that it even costs anything.

So let's look at what's involved and what you can expect to pay for professional advice and why you should most defintely do so.

Clearing Up the Mystery Over Unique Visitors

Clearing Up the Mystery Over Unique Visitors

Some of you may have discovered that there are different types of "visitors" within Google Analytics - Visitors, Absolutie Unique Visitors and Unique Visitors.

This can be frustrating when you're trying to build a picture of how many real customers are coming to your site and where they came from in terms of your marketing efforts.

I've long argued for my preference for Unique Visitors as a more useful metric. In a previous post I showed how to set up a Custom Report in Google Analytics to show that data for each marketing medium.

If you do set up such a Custom Report, you will probably find the data is at odds with other visitor data within Google Analytics.

Don't worry, As Avinash explains in the video, your Custom Report data for Unique Visitors is the one to trust. You can hear him answer my question at the 16 minute mark and explain the differences between the various visitor types.

The whole thing is worth watching as they cover a lot of great information on how to use Google Analytcs.

Two Google Marketing Goodies

SEO Cheat Sheet

Marketing Rules To Live By

In case you missed them, here are two Google goodies that will help you in your online marketing.

The first is the recently updated Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Starter Guide. It's called "Starter" but there's a lot of good stuff in here that will help you optimize your site for the search engines.

Download the guide here: Google SEO Starter Guide Updated.

The second is Google's Philosophy. Like many of you I was vaguely aware of what was in it, but until today I'd never actually read it.

The "Ten Things We Know To Be True" and the "Ten User Experience Aspirations" contain great business and marketing advice for anyone operating an online business.

Check them out, I'm sure you'll be impressed and maybe even inspired.

Ten Things We Know To Be True

Ten User Experience Aspirations

Enjoy.

Better Marketing with Google Analytics

How to Create a Custom Report for Unique Visitors From All Traffic Sources

Last week I posted how I made it on to Google Analytics TV asking about tracking Unique Visitors for All Traffic Sources.

The solution was to create a Custom Report, so here’s how to do it, but first...

Why Is This Important?

As marketers and business owners we normally want to know how many individual people came to our store and bought something. Plus we really want to know what made them come to the store in the first place.

This allows us to get a clear picture of how well our various marketing and advertising campaigns are working.

From there we can calculate the real conversion rate for each marketing channel and also the ROI.

Hear Me on Google Analytics TV

Recently I became frustrated at the lack of Unique Visitor data within Google Analytics.

After scouring the Google help forums to no avail, I left a short, terse comment on the Google Analytics TV blog and to my surprise Avinash Kaushik actually answered my question.

It's at the 27 minute mark "(27:36) Where you can find unique visitor data in Google Analytics."

The reason for my coment was I wanted to find Unique Visitors for each of a client's direct traffic sources.

The answer, as it turned out, was fairly simple: just create a custom report.

Which I did and that will be the subject of my next blog post, so stay tuned.

In the mean time watch the video and indulge my 15 seconds of fame.

Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer: Not Quite a Perfect

How to make Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer play nice with each other.

The most annoying thing about both Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer is that they don't work together "straight out of the box".

Simply pasting the code that the Optimizer gives you will cause several problems in Google Analytics which will basically kill all of your marketing data.

Setting up GA on its own to work properly is a task in itself, but when you add GWO on top of it, there are even more issues to deal with.

The Seven Habits of Highly In-effective Analytics

photo credit: 1happysnapper

A while back, I posted about online marketers paying lip service to conversion rate optimisation. Several research reports had revealed yet again that many marketers were not making full use of analytics

• If results truly matter, then why are so many marketers leaving so much business on the table?

• Why do they ignore the analytics gold at their fingertips?

With apologies to Steven Covey, here are seven observations of why many marketers ignore analytics: