When a dashboard is shared across different teams, then a specific group with special interests will start to ask more than what is in the dashboard, because their job duty is to support specific tasks within the business life cycle of the online business. In some occasions (probably most of the time), for example, when you create a web analytics dashboard for CEO, you'll always hear from some other team manager saying that that dashboard doesn't help "me" in anyway, and start to go off about what would be a great dashboard for him/her.

In a typical scenario, honest and hard working web analyst will try to make everyone happy, so he/she ends up making either an obese dashboard containing bunch of colorful charts, or bunch of redundant reports catered to every single managers in the company. You think a web site with one goal/objective would have a clear and simple dashboard for all to accept easily created, but it could get tricky. I believe it is important to think of dashboard as a starting point to dive into a pool of data.

The best way to create an effective dashboard, following points should be taken into consideration:

1. Understand the bottom line and the desired outcome of the web site.


2. Ask, why do each key business units exist in your firm and what is important for them to execute their job?


3. Know the kind of decisions your end users or business partners can make based on your dashboard.

Effective dashboards usually include:

• An intuitive graphical display that is thoughtfully laid-out, and easy to navigate.


• Logical structure so information is easy to consume.


• Regular and frequent updates of dashboard for relevance to current conditions.


• Answer fundamental questions about the web site's goal or overall business unit.


• It alerts issues or problems in such areas (error pages, ROAS, revenue, conversion rate, etc.)


• Supports decisions that impact the business or online strategies.

Killing multiple data needs with one dashboard

I am just using this phrase to push the minds to think in an effective way, so that KPIs are reported effectively to reduce redundancy. Check out this image of a scenario where you have multiple business units involved in a web site, and how they could have more data needs than that one Executive Dashboard which was created to make CEO smile and move.

The images may imply that web analyst will need to make 5 dashboards at the end of day. However, if you craft the dashboards effectively, you could potentially consolidate them to fewer reports. How you do that will depend on web analyst's skill to work with those key players and identify them KPIs for an actionable insights.

Here is a basic framework that I crafted to support approaching in creating that awesome web analytics dashboard (Tier 3 is not necessarily a dashboard, but most likely a report or an analysis.). It is intended to demonstrate that your dashboards or reports should be positioned and focused on catering the KPIs to appropriate audience/groups, and show different tiers of audiences which could reflect organizational structure with different focus on reporting needs.

Side note: If you give a web analytics access to each business units and allow one smart and motivated person to do their team's web analytics support, you can build allies of web analytics specialist. This could be a long term strategy to build web analytics culture within your company.

Inside the short, troubled life of a music start-up

Here is the background of SpiralFrog's business.
SprialFrog is a free digital music download service, which became the first company to convince a major music label to offer downloads on an ad-supported basis. The company's goal was to give away music and supported itself by selling advertising. SpiralFrog's management believed that the record companies would rush to do business with anyone who competed directly with illegal peer-to-peer sites, and they have focused heavily on simple plan to grow their business via aggressive marketing to turn visitors to loyal users.

Here are some key highlights from the article. Mostly a reflection of bad decisions. Let's see how you see it...

• Low registration rate, pages per visit, time on site, high bounce rate


• Company burned $26.3 million while generating sales of just $1.2 million


• The dramatic falloff of site traffic coincides with the board's decision to cut spending on affiliate marketing


• Management says "it needed to build volume and then swing over to quality. If you didn't build the volume, you could never get ads on the site from tier-1 advertisers".


• At one point, traffic grew from 2 million visitors to 3 million in the following month


• Affiliate marketing programs were introduced to spread the company's brand across its own site and many other affiliated sites.


• In January 2009, SpiralFrog's 2008 sales and marketing expenses came to $11 million (twice the $5.6 million the company paid in music licensing that year).


• One of their promo's ROAS was $60 per registered users. In worst case, they paid $490 for registered users.


• When the marketing programs were halted, traffic numbers crashed. SpiralFrog saw just 775,547 unique visitors in October, a fraction of the site's monthly peak of 7 million.

These are clear indications of two different HiPPOs (SpiralFrog management & investors) with one objective to make money, and outcomes driven by poor management and allocation of efforts. In other words, objective of making money off free music, with one outcome to drive enormous site visitors without putting emphasis to convert new visitors to loyal customers.

HiPPOs: Borrowing Avinash's term "HiPPO's", which means Highest Paid Person's Opinion.

From web analytics analyst stand point, it is important to diversify your analysis and translate the data into information for business. In SpiralFrog's case, web analytics analyst should emphasize their analysis and insights on:

• Measure sticky traffic driven by marketing efforts. Look beyond increase in site visitors. 1,000 visitors with 1 person converting, and putting more money just to increase that 99.9% of non engaged traffic makes no sense...


• Translate metrics to further optimize landing pages to increase conversion and ROAS.


• Gauge web metrics data and support CRM efforts to tackle efforts that work in converting new visitors to return visitors, and optimize marketing messages to drive loyal visitors.


• Test various campaigns that drive return visitors/ad clickers.


• Stop investing in marketing campaigns that don't work, and support business with metrics that eat lower hanging fruits instead of trying to consume the entire tree.

After all, at some point, management should have noticed that increase in traffic doesn't translate to great services and user satisfaction. Few ways web analytics analyst could do to assess learnings and support increase in satisfied users are (in SpiralFrog's case):

1. Segment your loyal visitors data, and see who they are and how are they engage with your service.
2. Web Analytics can only tell you the "what", but not "why". Take surveys, and assess the qualitative insights.
3. Look at visitors who bounce vs. visitors who don't bounce when arrived to the site. "High bounces equal throw more money to bring visitors that don't bounce" is a mistake. Is it a specific ad, keywords, ad group, banner color, or CTA that caused high bounces?
4. Measure and optimize rigorously on CRM efforts. You are dealing with loyal visitors, what can you do to increase and turn them into your "advocates"?
5. Track affiliate networks that drive loyal visitors. Affiliates emphasize on numbers rather than quality. They get paid for what they refer, not for referring satisfied visitors.

It sounds like I'm talking trash about SpiralFrog's web analytics analyst, but I can really understand the challenges in small companies that is backed up by huge amount of cash. HiPPOs are probably the bottle neck, and is the primary cause of not being able to take best actions based on web analytics insights.

Web analytics analysts are facing a steeper challenge in 2009. If these HiPPOs start to pretend they know all or everything about web analytics, investors and businesses will continue to burn cash for nothing. Plus they'll blame the analysts and eventually media will use web metrics to put blame at web analyst indirectly. Maybe that is a good stimulus plan for this economy... having these investors burn cash... j/k.

Good luck to all of the web analyst in the world !!

What I need to make clear is that this article is not intended to discuss how to make your web analytics tagging perfect. It could be nearly accurate to address your data needs in areas of high priority, but everything can not be tracked perfectly accurate in 100% manner. You have to accept that truth. Also web analytics helps you find actionable insights and trends, and the main objective is not to use it as a report for reporting accurate numbers.

Shopping cart is one complicated beast. Some eCommerce sites may have their shopping cart handled by third party applications or vendors, complicating web analytics tagging delivery. Also there are many if and else conditions so web analytics implementation may not handle every little single data capturing instances.

Let me list out some possible shopping cart tagging/tracking/data challenges, and see if your web analytics handle such instances.

• Item addition and removal. You may take cart add into consideration, but not car removal.
• Login session considerations. Some carts require login after an item is added to cart or some time before the confirmation. This dependencies may throw off your tagging exepectations.
• Page refresh on order confirmation page (thank you page). If your analytics software counts conversions based on pageviews or don't dedupe redundant sessions on confirmation page.
• Campaign variables not being pass along to cart, or conversions not attributing properly to campaign tagging.
• Search Engines indexing shopping carts with items in it, which could inflate unnecessary cart add. Not really a tagging issue, but felt like mentioning it here.
• Any optional activities and trackings required to address those usage. Example, promotional code, shipping calculations, billing info update, edit profile, etc. Anything in such nature may cause page refresh, and could be a potential cause of data inflaction.
• Different combos of quantities, products, special offers, etc. Depending on how these instances are handled, item, quantity, and revenue may not sync up right. Example, a user buys two pens with special promo of buy one get one free: You could tag it so it reflects two orders of pens applying average price on each, or two orders of pens with one full price attached to only one of the order, or handles it as one pen order and special offers tracking in separate bucket. The key is to have your data expectations aligned to what is really getting tracked.

The most important thing is to have your analytics planning well defined in advanced, and QA properly. Learn the trade offs, and be flexible about it. Do not lose focus on addressing the desired outcomes!!

Connecting the dots between site objective and desired outcomes could be done in multiple ways, and do not expect to answer every possible scenarios including stuff that is okay to know. Focus on NEED to know and ACTIONABLE KPIs.

Avinash, a well known web analytics evangelist says three specific desired Outcomes from a website are:

• Increased Revenue


• Reduced Costs


• Improved Customer Satisfaction/Loyaly

Now stepping a back a little bit, on a higher level, the three main Objectives for making a website are:

• Acquire


• Convert


• Retain

In a nutshell, the web analytics framework should support you (web analyst), to en light key business people with actionable insights on the desired outcomes to the site objectives. There should be nine main initial points of thinking to help you start analyzing and inspire actions through data.

1. How your acquisition initiatives impacted your desired outcomes in terms of revenue? So the three areas of points would be: Acquisition vs. Increase Revenue, Acquisition vs. Reduction in Cost, Acquisition vs. Customer Satisfaction/Loyalty. 3 points of interests here.
2. How your tactics in increasing conversions impacted revenue, reduction in costs, improving satisfaction/loyalty. Another 3 things here.
3. How did your customer retention efforts impacted your revenue, costs, and improved satisfaction/loyalty. Another 3 things here.

This sounds good, but it can be confusing... For example, with "Acquisition vs. Reduction in Cost", you may ask how can you reduce cost when you're investing your money to drive traffic? Well, maybe one of your acquisition efforts is SEO, so that you could spend "less" on PPC campaign and drive free traffic.

To make things less confusing, let's take a look at a visual of an idea and possible KPIs to look at for these 9 different points (actions points, web analytics methods, whatever you call it...).

These KPIs are just examples of what I thought really quickly, but hope you get the point.

The challenges for web analyst is to work with people, managers, executives, marketers, etc. Even if this methodology explicitly clarify the what needs to go into dashboards or actually do the changes, if those people don't help supporting the actions, then the data could become useless.

The main point of this visual table is for web analysts to vision and make decisions to connect the dots between Outcomes and Site Objectives. KPIs won't do all the work, analysts will need to dive into the analytics software and do more analysis to be confident in the findings and justifying the next action. Action to make more money!!

Depending on your reporting needs, you may come across making a weekly/monthly/adhoc reports just for an acquisition, conversion, or retention efforts. In that case, make sure to not forget the basic principle of 3 outcomes, and do your analytics magic to find actionable insights through the metrics you (including business people) think are important.

Remember, connecting the dots (analysis) is the fun part of doing web analytics.

The referring sites report under "Traffic Sources" describes how people referred from other sites, but if you really want to separate out various marketing channels (email, image search, partner sites, etc.), you may want to set up some filters. Basically segment your data to only look at this traffic source group.

The purpose of filtering out any referring domains relating to non-marketing channel is to really understand which web sites are contributing traffic to your site. And these referring sites are directing traffic to your site for either two reasons, which are either good or bad.

The good reason is your site is so good, that other sites couldn't resist putting up link(s) to your site. That results from this should be really great because it has the potential to boost your PageRank in Google, increase your sites or products awareness, contribute increase in revenue or orders, etc.

Although, additional links for other sites are good, there could be bad reasons, too. Extreme case is getting links from phishing/scam/spammed sites, which could bring down your quality score. Other reasons are, people are talking bad about your site/services/products/content, and sites are referencing to your site. Hopefully the anchor link doesn't say something irrelevant to your site...

Some of the key metrics to observe from these referring sites are similar to looking at your traffic source metrics. Visits, Pages per visit, avg time on site, bounce rate, desired outcomes (conversions), order, revenues, etc.

How to set up a filter or create a segmentation so that you can narrow your report to non-marketing channel - referring sites:

1) Go to "Advanced Segments" > "Create new custom segment"

2) Use "Source" dimension from the dimensions selection list, and use "Does not contain" expression. Enter values such as "mail", "google", or any domains associating to your partner sites, affilicate sites, etc.

3) Use "Medium" dimension and select "referral" to make sure you're working of data set coming from Referring Sites report.

Now that you have a custom segment that with cleaner data set representing non-marketing channel referring sites, you may find something interesting about those traffic sources.

Enjoy!!

• Which cities or countries have a great interest in the topics/services/products that you serve?


• How can you reach the potential site visitors in the empty part of the map?


• What is the difference in traffic behavior and performance for people viewing your site from different location?


• Biggest question is "What can you do to leverage this geographic data and increase your reach and increase site traffic?"

Before I look at these questions individually, I think geographic data is useful even if you're targeting users within your local area. Why? Because I think internet gives you the opportunity to grow your business/services/content beyond your local area, and learn from others outside of your local area.

Also just a piece of advice, if you're willing to serve your site to specific region you might want to consider the following strategies.

1. Use Google Webmaster Tools and set your "Geographic Target" in the settings.


2. Leverage country specific domain.


3. Obviously, use language specific to the region you want to target.

Now, back to my main questions and my insights surrounding it...

Which cities or countries have a great interest in the topics/services/products that you serve?

I came to learn that in past few days or weeks, my site had the most traffic from the city of London, and San Francisco came in second. I knew that UK is going wild with their interests on web analytics, and it definitely supported traffic to my site. However, people from San Francisco had lower bounce rate with higher pages per visit. This is where I had to drill down and try figuring out the "why" part.

So the point is, if your site is serving content that is readable to other countries, and traffic outside of your country is supporting your site's objective (buying, reading, registering, etc.), then geographic data becomes very important. If people in London is reading more content on my site, and supporting great outcomes, then maybe I need to act by writing in UK English style.

What does it look like for your site? Is the traffic from other countries significant enough to consider enhancing/adding sites targeting to those visitors?

How can you reach the potential site visitors in the empty part of the map?

Looking at the BLUE box that I circled within the map, I am thinking those countries should be considered in serving content to potentially acquire higher traffic/readership. Why those parts of the map in the entire world? Well, China (Mandarin), India (Hindi), and South America (Spanish) are the top languages that make up the top 4 languages (including English). These three languages (population of native speakers) combined is 2.7 times higher than the number of English speakers. Some may argue, there are more population in other countries where there are more households with connection to the internet. So it is not only the number of native speakers, but looking at their connectivity to the internet and interests to the subject served from your site is more important.

This is where you need to leverage "Language" metrics, where the data captures the preferred language that visitors have configured on their computers. Why do you need to look at this metrics? Well, it could be the English speakers with English language preference visiting your site from Asia, Europe, Africa, or South America.

Back to the original question, if you're trying to reach the people in other region it is important to target regions with high potential to generate the desirable outcome based on population, language preference, internet connectivity, interest to site's topic, etc. Let's leverage these geographic and language data from your web analytics tools!

What is the difference in traffic behavior and performance for people viewing your site from different location?

Earlier, I've mentioned that site traffic from London performed differently from visitors from San Francisco. The difference in metrics is the key in taking necessary action to optimize your site. If you're targeting a specific group of people from specific region, but you're not getting a great site performance as other regions, then it is time for you to dig and drill into your web analytics application to find out what is going on.

Maybe it is time to open a site or add content in other language catering to users outside of your local area.

What can you do to leverage this geographic data and increase your reach and increase site traffic?

Based on the precious geographic and language data provided by web analytics application, it is time to think through and take actions based on your actionable data/insights.

Here are some ideas and possible actions you can take (including the points stated earlier):

• Create/add sites or content catering to people other than your local region. Example) Start a site written in Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, etc.


• Take advantage of Google Webmaster Tools to geographically target your site in search.


• Take advantage of domains specific to certain countries. Example) .jp, .us, .nl, .eu, etc.


• Add or optimize your content to serve increasing interests from other regions.


• Participate in search campaign (PPC) and target based on geographic location and language.

Hopefully, I was able to make you re-think about geographic and language data, and stimulate your interest in looking into opportunities to expand your site's potential across the world.

I've listed out some of my favorites and ideas for applying segmentation. You'll see that a lot of the segmentation would be Segmentation A vs. Segmentation B, because the majority of segmentation would need to be applied so that you can compare to another data set. You can always compare to overall site data or even average for a specific time range.

Here are some examples of segmentations that could potentially assist your analysis.

• New visitors vs. Returning Visitors
• Direct vs. Search vs. Referring Sites
• Converted vs. Did not convert
• Registered vs. Not Registered
• Advocates vs. Non Advocates
• Branded Search vs. Non-Branded Search
• Loyal Visitors vs. Non-Loyal Visitors
• Users who put items in shopping cart but DID NOT purchase vs. Users who Purchased
• Engaged Audience vs. Not Engaged Audience

Multi-level Segmentation
Once you set up your segmentation and execute you analysis, you will get more curious about deeper segmentation. Let's call that multi-level segmentation.

Here is an example. Say you set up a segmentation analysis around new and returning visitors. Then it'll be wise to look at the difference between these two segmented groups by the search keywords they used to arrive at your site. Let's classify these groups as non-branded keywords and branded keywords.

It will look like this...
New Visitors vs. Returning Visitors broken down by branded terms and non-branded terms. Multi-level segmentation like this is do-able with careful implementation in Google Analytics. Other analytics applications do have such capacity to handle such segmentation so please consult with your vendors and their knowledge base.

What makes multi-level segmentation nice to look at, is that it allows you to zoom into a specific group and learn the difference between one segmented group to the other.

In the image above, non-branded terms had higher traffic than branded terms under returning visitors segment. However, what if it was the other way around (branded terms referring higher traffic from returning visitors segment)??

That means you must have done something great to promote your brand, so that retuning visitors are using your brand name in their search.

Ultimately, you'd probably want your direct and returning traffic to increase continuously right?? Well, that is another multi-level segmentation for you.

Direct - new vs. returning
vs.
Non-Drect - new vs. returning

I believe all of those social media tools are powerful, but it has to be used wisely, and have a long-term commitment. When I mean long term, I really mean lo---ng term.

The important thing about social media is not only about the quantity of comments and feedbacks that your throw into the social media space. It is also about the quality.

Successful bloggers, twitters or diggers have been contributing targeted and relevant content to their audiences. When I say audiences, those audiences should reflect people who are interested in you, your thought, brand, services, products, etc. Basically, you have to step up and represent your specialty and serve your audiences like they are your customer.

If you're purpose to tweet about your personal life so that your family or friends can feel close to you, that is totally fine and ok. From marketing stand point, it is wise to stick to your niche of specialty. For example, if you're in the field of web analytics, social media will work great for you if you contribute your knowledge on web analytics to the internet crowd. That quality of sharing will reflect you. So don't just shoot random messages on twitter, and digg irrelevant sites you're not interested into digg. Keep it niche and high quality. Don't forget to comment and network though those social media platforms.

Social media is a medium just like your website, which is part of an internet eco-system and it has to represent yourself or business. The important thing to know is that no matter what you do (as of 2009), most of the social media will generate your comment or direct traffic to other web page. What does that mean??
You have to have great content.

Why? Well, eventually if you're so bad ass in marketing, you will promote your site really well through social media.

If you're so good at it, you'll receive positive results (positive result could be increase in traffic, leads, conversions, etc.).

If you're so bad ass in marketing, people will talk about your site or article. Success in online marketing using social media or search needs to come from great content.

What are the ways to create great content for social media or search?

1) Create relevant content for your audience. Hopefully, you know your target audience and their interest. Create content that inspires them from your point of view and ideas. You first have to listen though. Listening in online could mean researching keywords that your users search online, use in comments, etc. Find out their interests.

2) When using social media, share comments and links that are helpful to the others. I believe karma works well in social media. Be good to others and others will be good to you. Share great information, and they will give you back great informations/comments/feedbacks/links !!

3) Don't always think about pages to convert. Think about pages to support pre-selling. The majority of people research before making their decision to purchase. Some say almost 90% of online consumers read reviews before making a purchase. Create content to stimulate their desire to want something and eventually need it. Massage your consumers into your great products or services!!

4) Your content strategy should also support long term goals. Sure, technology changes and information gets old quickly. However, have you heard of long-tail in SEM? Well, those dead contents can support your current topics through internal links. Make sure you leverage your old content through internal links and social media to drive conversation.

5) Be creative. I always hear from people who are interested in writing a blog, but can't because they don't know what to write even if they have a passion for something. There are so many tools out there for you to understand what people are searching and talking about the topic relating to your passion. Isn't that what social media is for? Share and talk, and don't be afraid to write content based on your learnings.

I'm sure I can go on and on about ways to create content for social media and search, but the bottom-line is, you have to take advantage of various tools that are part of internet eco-system to drive your passion or business. It all comes back to your site, follow your traffic trends in Google Analytics or other web analytics tools you use. If you aren't tracking your site... do it now!!

How did it work out for me? Well, I've just started using twitter recently (@k_irizawa)... so far I saw little, but a sure growth in traffic from twitter. I'm starting to see some effects from digg.com after heavily participating in commenting and digging. I increased my usage on stumbleupon, and I'm noticing traffic referrals from stumbleupon is growing. They are pretty engaged with my site, too. (low bounce rate, yes!!)

Note that I don't only promote my site through these social media channels, but I participate in sharing great content. It looks like karma is working for me. Let's see how it turns out next year. I'll do my best in reporting back that results to you.

Justin posted an article on March '09 -- Integrating Google Analytics with a CRM

Basically, there is a configuration you can do on javascript so that you can capture Google Analytics values and throw it into forms, CRM, or other areas of datasets.

According to his explanation, you have to use javascript to extract data from Google Analytics, store it in hidden form elements, and attach it to the form when users hit that submit button.

Why this is a great idea? Well, a lot of simple sites, including my my site have a contact form, but it only parses the data entered by the users and other necessary values to make the parsing work properly (behind the scene).

Taking my contact form as an example, it only captures "Name", "E-mail", "Interest", and "Comments". Now with Justin's suggested configuration, you can pass along various Google Analytics values:

- Source (Possible campaign sources are Banner ad, Search PPC, Link Exchange, Newsletter, etc.)
- Medium
- Term
- Content
- Campaign Name
- Custom segmentation
- Number of visits

Wow... ok, what this means to me or you is that you can optimize the contact form to acquire not only the values we asked from the users, but all of these values from Google Analytics.

That means on an individual level, for example, I can tell Mr. ABC came from Google PPC, with the term "web analytics specialists", and had 4 visits before contacting me.

Some may say, you can do that in the Google Analytics tool. Well, you got to slow down and be careful about that comment. Note that it is against the Google Analytics terms of service to capture individual identity information.

That is why it is nice to see that Google Analytics data integrating directly to forms, emails (in my inbox), into external CRM database, etc.

For those who are running enterprise level CRM suite, this is probably a joke considering that those CRM solutions can dynamically capture way more data and perform segmentation. But for small sites, bloggers, or micro-sites running Google Analyitcs, I feel like this has opened a door to a new level of thinking in site tracking using Google Analytics.

If you're starting a blog or site for your company, but don't have that money to buy enterprise solution, you're most likely to use Google Analytics because that is like the standard for free web analytics tool now a days (because it is well known).

Check out the following list of applications, some of them could be a great tool to supplement your current web analytics application.

Woopra
Woopra is based on Java, and has both desktop and web service to monitor the metrics. Woopra has a unique feature that allows you to chat with your user and acquire non-numerical information.

*image from woopra.com

Other selling points of Woopra is Live Tracking, Rich User Interface, "Real-Time Analytics", "Lightning Quick Data Drilldown", "Visitor and Member Tagging", "API" and "Real Time Notifications".

Currently Woopra is in close private Beta.

For more info go to Woopra.com

Piwik
Piwik is an open-source web analytics application based on PHP and MySQL. What is great about Piwik, it has a "plugins" mechanism that allows various extension and customization. If you're a developer, you could probably make one your self.

What is good for some people or business is that Piwik's data is stored in your server/database. So you own the data. The user interface is customizable, which is probably something similar to Google Analytics dashboard. Piwik fans, you can correct me if I'm wrong.

For more info go to Piwik.org.

Yahoo! Analytics
Did you know Yahoo! had an analytics application?? Well, Yahoo! acquired IndexTools, and that became Yahoo! Web Analytics. It is an enterprise site analytics tools that provides data in real-time, with powerful tools and dashboards.

4Q Iperceptions
Big credit to @Avinash, 4Q is used by my site, and it has given me a lot of insights that are qualitative. It answers the "Why" part of your web analytics questions. It is an awesome tool gather your user feed back and their satisfaction with your site.

Check out my article about 4Q: Results from 4Q Iperceptions Survey | Measuring User Satisfaction

FireStats
FireStats is free for non-commercial usage, and FireStats costs 25$ per installation for commercial usage.

What I like about FireStats is that it is very simple. And visibility on your source agents and IP is a pretty nice feature. Apparently FireStats got great APIs so if you're a hands-on person, definitely might want to try it out.

Snoop
Snoop is a desktop based application that runs both on Mac and PC. Tagging is done in a similar fashion to Google Analytics, pretty simple and straight forward. Great feature of Snoot is the "Name Tags" to easily identify exactly who your visitors are. It works by associating information to username, e-mail, account ID, etc.

Other great web analytics tools
MochiBot: It is a free analytics tool designed for Flash assets. For those flash heavy sites, it might be a good choice to try MochiBot by simply adding few lines of ActionScript code in the .FLA files.

JAWStats: Server-based web analytics application that runs with AWStats. If you're happy with AWStats, then you'll probably like JAWStats. Benefits of JAWStats are easy installation and rollback, and doesn't interfere with AWStats. It has an easy dashboard manipulation.

A lot of analyst do run several web analytics applications. Example, for me, I run Google Analytics and 4Q Iperceptions. You definitely want to understand and research the benefits of each applications' features before implementing everything (unless you're obsessed with installing web analytics).

Make sure that you understand what data you need and the pros and cons of each web analytics system, even Google Analytics.

From SEO stand point, you want to use keywords that are more relevant to what users are searching. You also want to consider choosing the right combination of terms to match the keywords that are searched more than other relevant keywords.

So here is a basic process to use to kick of you list of keywords that are more user-centric.

For this specific example, I will use search terms relating to SEO to come up with possible content ideas and keywords relating to SEO that are relevant and effective.

1) Create a general list of keywords. Perhaps five of them. Let's call this List-A.

It is advised to start by thinking what your readers or customers are thinking. Try not to come up with terms that are industry specific or too granular. Start off with general terms that associate well with your readers.

You can ask your friends, family, customers, and colleagues. Let's start with these examples.

List-A
SEO
SEO Optimization
SEO Tools

2) Do some research!! Then come up with second list of keywords. Let's call this List-B.

• Find out what your users are talking or searching about SEO.
• Visit your competitor's websites: Check their backlinks and keywords they are targeting
• Visits blogs of your industry.
• Check out reviews, comments, and testimonials.

List-B
Google SEO
SEO Services
SEO Keywords

3) Combine the two list Final List = List-A + List-B

Final List
SEO
SEO Optimization
SEO Tools
Google SEO
SEO Services
SEO Keywords

4) Analyze the list and come up with keyword matrix

I recommend using Google AdWord Keyword Tool to come up with potential keywords related terms for your SEO strategy.

Once you make the first column within the keyword matrix table, select relevant terms associating to your content. Create additional columns based on your keyword selections.

Now, you have a list of keywords that you could potentially use to better optimize your pages for search. Welcome to SEO!!

Note: Don't forget to leverage competition and CPC data given in the Google Keywords Tool

I'm not sure, but it is definitely an important aspect if you really want to maximize your traffic. Even if you're acquiring qualified traffic to your site, if your landing page is not effective, then you'll end up sending them back to where ever they came from.

I'd like to re-introduce to you Landing Page Optimization or LPO. Reason is, I feel like minimal effort can go into LPO, and make your site even more effective. Some of the key areas of what you'll want to see from LPO is reducing bounces, stream line traffic to high performing pages, and increase conversion.

Here are some of the key techniques and data points to look for in your web analytics tool, to make your landing page more effective.

I will use Google Analytics for my examples.

1) Top Landing Page vs. Bounce Rate (Avg)

For a data from x date to y date, select the top landing page report. Then click on the "camparison" view, which is on the right of the four view selections. Select "Bounce Rate", to see the bounce rate of each landing pages against overall bounce rate average.

This example tells me, 58.4% of all entrances occur from the top 10 landing pages. In other words, the top 10 landing pages, out of 144 landing pages contributed 58.4% of all site entry.

Obviously, you would want to concentrate on your top 10 landing pages before you even jump into optimizing other pages.

2) Set a Goal to reduce the bounce rate.

Currently, the overall site's bounce rate is 63.5%. Say you want to reduce that to 50.0%. Let's do the math.

Bounce Rate = Total Bounces / Total Entrances = 1,794 / 2,824 = 63.5%

Desired Total Bounces = (Desired Bounce Rate) x (Total Entrances) = 50.0% x 2,824 = 1,412

Amount of bounces required to reduce = 1,412 - 1,794 = 382 OR 21%

This will give you a clearer picture for the actual amount of bounces you need to reduce in order to achieve the desired overall bounce rate.

Just looking at the top 10, here, we have the opportunity to optimize 5 landing pages. Because we know that these 5 pages are performing worse than the overall bounce rate (63.5%), we have the opportunity to reduce 393 bounces.

393 bounces = [(231+109+100+99+81) x 63.5%].

This 393 bounces are around par to the amount of bounces I would like to see improved.

3) Why are people bouncing from these pages?

This is a very broad topic. Every pages are probably unique, and users arrive on that page differently. So I'll introduce few tactics in approaching what to think of before tackling out your page optimization.

a) Traffic sources

Look at the traffic sources of each landing page by drilling down to each individual landing page and select "source".

• Is it the search engine driving traffic and causing bounces?
• Is it other referring sites driving traffic to this landing page?
• Is the campaigns that you're investing in to drive higher traffic to these content causing high bounces?

If the majority of users to a landing page are arriving by a specific phrase or keyword, maybe there is something about the page which is not relevant to people's search.

Also, what is touted on the referring site is not relevant to the actual landing page.

One you get a firm understanding of where users are coming from, you'll getter a better sense of what users are experiencing.

You definitely don't want users landing on the page with KPI definition when they have intended to learn about "how to come up with KPI" or "KPI to make money". Double check your content, and page title to see if you're serving the right descriptions.

Apply the findings to your optimization.

b) Page layout and creative

Since every content is unique, going through every single content on your page is pretty painful, if you serve thousands of pages. That is one reason why I looked at the top 10 landing page.

Now, after looking at the traffic source, other area to look at is your actual page. Your page may serve the right information, but it doesn't necessarily address and represent the information in a user friendly manner.

You might want to ask your self the following questions.

• Does the page has a exit link towards the top? If the page has an exit link (or any links to other sites) towards the top of your page, then users may leave your site even before they finish reading and click through to other page.
• Is your page too wordy? Obviously, people may loose interest when they see a page full of text. You might want to consider breaking out the paragraph and put some image if necessary. Give your users' eyes some break.
• Are the color, layout, text size, or creative causing a bad user experience? Might want to consider testing these elements as well. I definitely don't want to read a blog with a background of shocking pink or neon yellow.

4) Optimize and Test

Once you have identified the areas of improvement, you may want to consider executing your changes and test it.

I recommend using Google Website Optimizer since it is a free tool and you'll acquire just enough learnings from doing an A/B test on your old vs. new page.

Optimize, Test, Optimize, Test.... Basic fundamentals of web analytics.

Note that, in order to test it is not going to happen in over night. You might have to give it a few days for the site to acquire significant amount of traffic data.

Enjoy optimizing your landing page !!

Site optimization related article: Tip: 4 steps to site optimization

This should guide you in formulating your thoughts around what to track on your site.

• All pages should contain tracking codes with unique page identifier (page name, content title, etc.).
• All campaign initiatives driving traffic to the site (via banner, email, link exchanges,e tc.) should be tracked through campaign tracking. Typically done through putting a unique query code in the URL string.
• Any conversion pages (thank you pages) should be defined as a "Goal" or an event in analytics tool. Any key pages where you want data to persist across the site or metrics, consider using special custom tracking to reflect those trackings. Example, SiteCatalyst uses eVar and Google Analytics uses "user defined" tracking.
• Activate eCommerce tracking in your analytics suite if your site is an eCommerce site.
• Make sure to activate or acquire internal search tracking in analytics tools. It is also important to assess what users are searching within your site.
• Create segmentation strategy and consider implementing it in your analytics tool. Custom segmentation should be assigned around several key factors for deeper insights and analysis. i.e. Users that bounced, users from search with specific terms, users from specific campaign, login vs. not logged in, etc.
• Take into consideration of Flash & AJAX tracking if your site is planned to be rich in graphics.
• Any click events including outbound link should be tracked if it is part of a key business strategies or objectives.

In site tracking strategy, you have to consider analyzing many data points. You won't be able to cover every single data points. That'll be TOO much. Understand your site's goal, and select your KPI -- KEY Performance Indicators.

Understand and at least formulate your thoughts for analysis around the following:

Traffic Source

• Traffic source or campaign includes (not limited to): banner, rich media, email, PPC, link exchanges, RSS, etc.


• Consider using vanity URL or friendly URL when driving traffic from other medium such as DM, radio, tv, etc. (offline). Make sure you're tracking those vanity URLs.


• Segmentation should be applied to all different sources to assess the optimal source of traffic with great ROI.

What users are doing (behavior metrics)

• All content should be tracked to see what users are interested, and their level of engagement.


• Customer advocacy should be tracked (tell a friend, share with friend, etc.).


• Product awareness and exposures should be assessed separately from content performance.


• Conversion metrics should be tracked by identifying the conversion pages, and set up necessary funnels to view optimization opportunities.


• If possible, track RSS subscription click on "subscribe to RSS".


• Capture internal search queries to assess what users are interested in and looking for.

Visitor Type

• Identify demographic of site visitors. Especially if viral and brand awareness is the key to success, it may start at regional level and spread across the country. It would be worth gauging traffic level and engagement metrics by demographic data. Such demographic data could be utilized when investing in PPC campaign to target your audience and properly allocate budget to proper regions.


• New vs. Returning traffic. This would be an important data to observe, especially considering that loyal users would come back to the site, and they would definitely behave differently from new visitors. Acquire deep insights from your visitors by looking at new vs. returning traffic.


• Loyalty metrics would be important to identify deeper insights about the site's audience who are loyal to your site/brand/product/services. Especially if your repeat buyers or highly engaged audience are key to the site's success.

Segmentation

• Always think about segmentation during your analysis. Segment various dimensions. (i.e. by source, conversion, specific behavior, etc.)


• Think about integration of different variables from campaigns to conversions. Then segment according to the integration.


• Tie metrics to conversion. Making sure that every key conversion pages are tracked and able to segment by different dimension of metrics. (i.e. conversion by traffic sources, conversion by demographic, etc.)

Hopefully this bulleted points will contribute to your thoughts around setting up web analytics trackings. Feel free to throw me your thoughts. I may have missed out an important point.

When building your site or pages, you should be aware of how you serve your site content based on your users' point of view. Different users may have different intent when they arrive at your site, so catering your content based on such difference would be an important part of your content strategy. In this article, I'd like to talk about content strategy based on users' needs and wants.

Here is a basic difference in definition for "NEEDS" and "WANTS".

Needs are strong human desires to fulfill lack of feelings or things.

The above NEEDS become WANTS when they are directed to specific objects that might satisfy the need.

- So an American needs food but may want a hamburger, French fries, and a soft drink.
- A person in Mauritius needs food but may want a mango, rice, lentils, and beans.
- A person may need a computer, but may want a Dell Laptop with 4GB of memory.
- People may need to drink because they are thirsty, but they may want some beers, coke, tea, or coffee.

Overall, It is easier to sell to a person who already know what he/she wants. That's because it is likely that a user will search what he/she wants in search engines, and he/she will land on a page that is relevant to what he/she wants.

For a user with a specific needs, he/she has to be convinced into wanting something in order to make them take a desirable action.

Let's look at a basic example

User A "WANTS" an iPod
1) Searches for "iPod" on Google

2) Lands on an online store that sells iPod

3) Makes a decision to purchase based on various info

User B "NEEDS" a portable music player
1) Searches for "portable music player" on Google

2) Land on an online store that sells different kinds of portable music players

3) User B will have to learn about various music players including iPod

4) Makes a decision to purchase based on info

What does this all mean??
That means, you need to understand that how you position your site/pages, you need to be aware of the keywords used from search engines, and assess to see if your content strategy is working properly (making users taking a desired action).

So it is advised to look at --
1) Pages (perhaps landing pages) against the keywords from search.

2) Assess the keywords from search and see what kinds of keywords (w/ different possible intent) generated lower/higher bounces, conversions, etc..

3) Optimize your content or CTA (call to action) to better serve your users.

4) If a lot of your users are arriving based on their "NEEDS", then make sure you have a nice user friendly page that serves useful information. Make them "WANT" what you got!!

The code "301" means "file moved permanently".

A 301 redirect is implemented in your .htaccess file. In the .htaccess file, after the code, the URL of the missing or renamed page is noted, followed by a space, then followed by the new location or file name.

A 301 redirect is the most efficient and spider and visitor friendly strategy around for web sites.

Why you should consider using 301 redirect for site relaunch

It's easy and simple to set up 301 redirects and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you HAVE to change file names or move pages around, it's the safest option to redirect pages without impacting your page ranking.

A lot of site lose out on valuable search engine traffic due to incorrectly configuring the redirects. It is very import that when a search engine comes to crawl your website it is able to follow any redirects you have set up.

Suppose you have a website http://www.xyz.com and you create a redirect such that whenever any visitor types in the URL http://www.xyz.com he is automatically redirected to http://www.xyz.com/abc/, If the Search Engine is not able to follow the redirect it would think that http://www.xyz.com has no contents, http://www.xyz.com would end up ranking very badly in search engines.

Common way to track it through web analytics

I track my 404 error page by adding the google analytics tracking code in it.

I remember at one point, I updated all of my URLs to reflect best SEO practices by replacing URLs that contain "_" to "-". However, I missed out several pages, so I carefully looked at what pages resulted in 404, and added the new page URL to the 301 redirect.

This is one way you can leverage your analytics and error pages to make sure all of the page requests are redirected to proper page URLs.

We come to think that highest bidder will always rank higher than lower bidder due to the nature of traditional auction. However, it doesn't work that way with Google Adwards. Here are the main takeaways of these three key points that determine ad positions and CPC (cost per click) for Adwards.

What determines the Quality Score

1) Quality score is determined by Relevancy, Landing Page, and Click-through Rate (CTR).

2) Relevancy is determined by language used within the ad, and its language against the keywords used in the search query.

3) Landing page should have relevant, original content, quick load time, minimal pop-ups/unders, and transparency of site interaction between the server and users.

What determines Ad Ranking

1) Ad ranking is determined by Bid Price (BP) and Quality Score (QS):
Ad Rank = BP x QS

2) Ad with highest Ad Rank gets the top position.

What advertisers pay

1) Paid price is the bid amount the price is set by the advertiser below him/her.

2) Advertisers do not necessarily pay the max bid price.

3) High quality score will yield lower price or CPC.

4) Advertisers have to pay:

P1 = Price that Advertiser-1 pay
Q1 = Quality of Advertiser-1 ad
B2 = Bids of Advertiser-2
Q2 = Quality of Advertiser-2 ad
Note: Ad Rank = (B2)(Q2) = Bid Price x Quality Score

(P1)(Q1) = (B2)(Q2)
P1 = [(B2)(Q2)] / (Q1) = CPC

Here is the video. Check it out!

Link: Introduction to the ad auction

We need to remember that your site content that are available to internet users determines the keywords users will use to arrive at your site. That will we based on various factors from Page Rank, external links, content relevancy, etc. (SEOMoz has great content regarding SEO). Therefore, "what" is available on your site will contribute to "what" you'll find in analytics tool under search engine keywords referrals.

One reason I am writing about this topic is because analyst could report top popular keywords from search, best converting keywords, keywords with great ROI, etc., but that doesn't address a common behavioral pattern internet users perform.

For major sites that promote their brand, branded terms from search is pretty important to know. Because if your site's objective is to build brand awareness and exposures, it'll be very important to reach audience who are looking for your brand.

If you are trying to reach new consumers who don't know about your brand, and want them to remember your brand through your site using SEM -- it is critical to remember that you'll need to reach them by promoting search terms that are associated to your brand. For example, for an apparel company, it could be related to a type of cloths (t-shirt, jeans, sweater, etc.).

Once you reached your users, assuming your site did a great job in brainwashing them with your brand and products/services, they will likely and possibly return back to your site (may even buy or convert, too!!) through search terms related to your brand or company's name.

Here are some steps I would use in approaching to gauge your initiatives in transforming non-branded referrers to your brand referrers.

1) Assess and acquire knowledge on current distribution of users coming from branded keywords vs. non-branded keywords. Let's say 80% branded vs. 20% non-branded to demonstrate this example.

2) Invest in acquiring traffic from non-branded terms utilizing your data acquired through analytics -- perhaps increasing traffic from the long-tail of non-branded keywords segment, participate in PPC campaign, increase content to acquire organic search traffic, etc.

3) Create two segmentations (or simply track) traffic from organic search traffic via non-branded terms, and returning traffic from branded terms.
Note: you can also generally look at overall traffic from search vs. returning traffic via search as well. However, it is advised to look at it more granular.

4) Measure the performance and results against different time. Before vs. After, Month to Month, Week vs. Week, etc.

Hopefully this gives you a different perspective on how you look at branded terms to non-branded terms, and understand how to assess traffic impacted from users converting from non-branded referrer segment to your loyal branded referrer segment.

I thought their tactics are interesting because who would have thought to use twitter in promoting a taco truck that traditionally relied on location, repeaters, and a horn (to notify people).

The fact that it received 300~800 people for its food, indicates that the twitter successfully delivered their viral efforts in attracting customers. This is a true Viral Marketing + Social Network + Offline marketing integration. Kudos to Kogi BBQ.

In my observation, the key to success had to have these ingredients.

• Unique product to catch people's attention. In Kogi's case, food menu that are different from common taco truck.


• Introduce unique food to the mass in the right timing. While many marketers are figuring out how to leverage social media with a lot of attention to Twitter, Kogi used such tools to successfully promote their business.


• Obviously, Kogi successfully used social media to promote their offline business. The key is offline promotion through online media. Thinking outside of the box!


• Location: Instead of choosing common area where they could potentially gain their targeted audience, they chose locations anonymously to stimulate consumer interest and curiousity around different location consumers aren't familiar with.

As we learn from recent air plane landing on Hudson river (NY) that Twitter can deliver quick news and information around the world, Twitter and social media could be utilized to spread information quickly to a wide range of audience. It also has clearly demonstrated it could be used to stimulate offline business as well.

The next challenge is to retain consumer interest and build loyal customers. Good luck to Korean BBQ taco trucks.

He hosts various sites regarding FX trading covering wide range of topics around that vertical. I've came to learn many things from MR. Affiliate. I've learned that he doesn't use web analytics, but continues to maintain great affiliate conversions.

I'm sure you want to here how he made it that far. I don't want to write a whole lot of about every single thing, but here is a list things he mentioned that describes what he does to maintain his financial success with affiliate marketing.

• MR. Affiliate maintains 20 sites that focus on affiliate conversion (money acquisition).
• MR. Affiliate maintains 500 sites that caters specific topics to FX trading, and applies "links" back to his main sites.
• MR. Affiliate is only interested in high EPC (earning per conversion) affiliate partners. Which are couple hundreds of dollars.
• MR. Affiliate writes and updates his site everyday. Only on the main 20 sites that he focuses on.
• MR. Affiliate is partnering with Chinese content writer in China, and catering sites with language other than Japanese. I'm assuming he links some of those sites back to the main sites as well.
• 50% of MR. Affiliate's efforts are on SEO.
• MR. Affiliate uses Google Analytics for tracking his sites, but doesn't use it often. He uses Google Analytics to gauge what keywords people are searching to arrive to his sites.

MR. Affiliate is at a point where his EPC is not growing anymore, but maintaining its position in FX trading vertical. So he wanted to know what he could do to promote and increase his traffic to the site traffic. He was curious to learn what is new and hot in America.

Since I'm a web analytics specialist, I had to start from Google Analytics and walk him through how he could leverage the application better. Web analytics could definitely support assessing what is going on within the site, acquire knowledge in potential area for optimization, and understand source of acquisition for improving conversions.

Since his new goal is to understand and increase his user acquisitions, I showed the following features within Google Analytics:

• Setting up "User define" value on his site, and applying it on outgoing links.
• Setting up campaign tracking from his media campaign, other sites, etc.
• Since he focus on a lot on SEO, utilizing the search traffic segmentation
• Landing page analysis and dimension drill down by different metrics breakdown.
• Linking these methods and other analytics strategies to link clicks defined by "User define".

Through these recommendations on effective usage of Google Analytics, MR. Affiliate was able to better understand:

• Setting up key tracking point for user actions. (link clicks for this case)


• Better understand effective traffic source for his affiliate business.


• Linking effective traffic source (including search and keywords) to desired user action.


• Gauge and analyze landing pages that could be optimized and further acquire conversions. (key is to look at bounce rate on key landing pages).

Other than analytics related discussion, we talked about SEO practices. Since his site his heavily dependent on SEO, he was very curious about such new and common SEO practices in USA. He heavily concentrated on his efforts on external link acquisition, but I recommended him to further look at the content and internal links.

I've learned that his site used "_" rather than "-", so that was one area of SEO recommendation. Another point was to encourage usage of page title within URL. For example, instead of xyz.com/2008/09/00001-abc.html, I suggested him to use some like xyz.com/fx-article/article-title-abc-2008-09.html.

Another point of SEO practice he could focus on is the internal link exchange. Certain pages could have high "Page Rank", and it could be utilized to cross pollinate that ranking to other pages with high conversion.

It was interesting to learn that a person could be very successful without web analytics, but it was also an eye opener for him to realize how web analytics could be used in optimizing his sites, and increase conversions (more money for him).

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Data warehousing varies in different business set ups. Both amenities and technical hazards are associated with the practice of keeping the internal data in the online stores. It is one of the most acceptable ways of storing in-house data. Intranet is the sophisticated form of storing a company's internal records for future assessments.

Point-of- Sales records and transactions are also preserved in this mechanism. There is more than one way of online marketing data warehousing. In these systems, web analytics are maintained in online stores for easy reference.

Of the prominent ways of storing online analytics through data warehousing, we have:

• Data Mart data warehousing: Data warehousing through data marts is one design methodology. It focuses on giving up business objectives for specific departments in an organization and their development. Data marts emphasize the development of a business set up through dimension modeling locally.
• Data warehousing area wise: Web analytics data warehousing can be carried out on specific areas of particular business. Web analytic data storage starts with the data available from the online store of records. The existing records can be enriched with external data input as and when needed. Sales and purchase transaction records can be maintained through Point-of-sale data storage.
• Third Way data warehousing: In third way data warehousing, detailed business reports and needs of company set up, technical resources required for a company's progress-their availability and applications are preserved. This methodology is derived from the combination of the two major web analytic design methodology. It also states the other requirements of a business set up.

Online Marketing data stores helps us carrying out instant searches at search engines through data mining. Internal data stores offer Click-Stream data and integrated detailed click-stream data feeds. Data warehousing by Omniture help businesses prepare re-marketing lists. The web analytics also help keeping a track on the online visitor's nature, the inbound site traffic source and the online behavior of the site traffic. Data warehousing by Google Analytics and Omniture has a number of benefits to offer:

• Data Archives: Online data warehousing helps in maintaining records in archives for ready reference. Websites can keep a record of all Web traffic leading to a particular web page and the leads generated to the Website.
• Click-Stream Data on advanced search: With a simple click on the search engine, we receive click-streamed online data.
• Data warehousing leads to data feeds: With advanced search queries, the leads generate inbound links to the data. This in turn lead to valuable data feed to the website.
• Advanced segmentation of web analytics data: An advanced segmentation of the website leads to an easy availability of the relevant data. This can easily be done with the user-friendly drag and drop interface of the Google Analytics Report.
• Unique Visitor IDs: Users receive respective visitor IDs with the personalized user accounts.
• Re-marketing lists: E-commerce and Online Marketers can prepare re-marketing lists with the unique visitor IDs.
• External data integration: Most of the web analytics applications allow analyst to correlate external data by integrating it with the click-stream data. It is usually done through uploading a mapping/data file that contains a unique index key, so that data could be mashed up.

Web Browsing on Google and MSN offer user privacy mode, which enables websites to track the nature of inbound traffic to the site. There are limitations with users clearing off PC cookies on a regular basis. This leads to the removal of files and data that might prove vital for web analytic metrics.

Data warehousing for web analytics can be easily done with the help of web tools. There are web tools like Software as a Service (SaaS) that are commonly used in preparing metric reports. These tools are widely used to collect information on site operations, nature of site traffic and to make a competitive analysis of the data gathered. Number and options of website vendor support has also grown higher than before.

Data warehousing are needed to keep a track of web analytics. Figures on client data and facts on a visitor account are preserved with online data stores. Visitor accounts – its different types, sizes of the accounts and balances are well preserved. Customer-care metrics and other statistical figures are also preserved in these internal stores of records. Preparing monthly metrics to submit reports and analysis via tools like Google Analytics are also done. However, data warehousing has a number of limitations associated with it:

• Time Constraint: Preparing Reports through Online data warehousing could be time consuming if it is running through a batch process. Any re-run would cause a delay in downstream data dependencies: For this purpose, data stored on the internal database might have to be modified.
• Existing database modification: To bring in changes in the online data, the database may require modification. This in turn could raise the infrastructural cost and new software may be installed for bringing in changes.
• Threat to internal data storage security: Though the mechanism is quite effective for practical use, there might be security concerns. The database might have confidential reports with limitations. In these cases, data accessibility may have restrictions to the top management.
• Vigilance over Data warehousing: Accounting confidential reports and analyzing them with Google Analytics has its advantages. But business and corporate houses have to exercise authority on tracking the websites and modifications brought out on the internal data.

This is just a quick overview of what could be a possible pros and cons of web analytics from data warehousing stand point. It is definitely not limited to what is mentioned here in this article. This is another area of great opportunities and challenges for web analytics professionals.

To give you a little background, the community we wanted to reach was very niche and sub-cultural. The target audience is very unique, so we thought leveraging the community site on various domains would be interesting. Here are several points I've noticed and thought were interesting. It may not be interesting to you, if you practice marketing through social media or online community already, but if you're new and wanted to try it out, you may find these information encouraging for your future online marketing tactics.

Communicating with the community

I was surprised to see how quickly communities could be built. It depends on which site you used in creating the community, but for Facebook page, it was nice to see the "fans" increase from 3 to 50 in one day.

In terms of communication with the fans in Facebook page, it would allow you to directly send a message to your fans. This is one great CRM strategy you can put into your CRM tactics.

Being able to communicate with your community is a very important feature you need to be aware of, and understand "what to" and "how to" use the site's features in executing communication would be critical.

Depending on the site or community you create, you wouldn't need web analytics tool because the number of members/fans joined would be clearly stated. That would be equivalent to your database filled with user who opted in for your communication.

Community interactions and its effectiveness

Depending on the community or social media/networking sites that you're participating in, user interaction or involvement with the community would vary. For my wife's account, we uploaded several photos of new products and special offers, and seeded messages to promote what was happening with the brand at that time. On other site, it was a simple text notifying the special offers at that time. Other possible ways of interaction with your audience under your community:

• Send messages to the group
• Create polls and surveys, and learn about your audience/community
• Utilize site specific features such as apps, ads, pokes, etc.
• Share links and information
• Tag product images with brand names, to make it searchable, etc.

To measure how effective these interactions and community participations would vary on the objective, but it is important to keep your community live and active. At the end of the day, higher positive feedbacks or comments from your target audience translate to better brand awareness, and it could possibly increase your brand or product advocacy.

For my wife's account, we instantly saw several transactions (product purchases) from one of the community site in Google Analytics' referring sites conversion. Note: eCommerce tracking was activated in Google Analytics.

We've also saw an increase in product testimonials and interests for the products/services. These points of actions and conversions should be your metrics to gauge along with your KPIs.

Just like media campaign running impressions to assess brand or product exposures, your user activities and interactions within those community sites could translate to positive and effective user experience with your brand. It would also be a great place to address negative comments and concerns amongst your community as well. Now, that's some stuff that could be highly effective.

User loyalty and retention

It would be unlikely to use your web analytics application on these sites (Obviously, it is nearly impossible to throw your tracking code on other sites), but there are many points of data within those sites you can translate into metrics. Example: no. of fans, no. of comments, no. of positive/negative testimonials, polls and survey participations, etc. It is imperative to utilize those metrics to gauge the activity within your community.

You definitely have the choice to promote your community by actively promoting those communities, but I believe the value of those social networking pages and communities is its capability to retain and promote user loyalty and retention.

We typically measure retuning traffic to the site and come up with strategies to promote return traffic, loyalty, and retention. However, these community and social networking sites are purposely built to bring back people to communicate and interact with others. Therefore, leveraging such nature of those portals would make sense, than just using it to acquire traffic to your site.

Summary

I think it would be important for my wife's account to understand that building user loyalty on those external sites would increase overall user satisfaction, loyalty, and retention with their brand. So looking beyond the property of their own site, and expanding their reach into other properties would be an important online strategy going forward.

The survey firm utilized the ACSI (American Consumer Satisfaction Index) which is a method developed by University of Michigan to measure consumer satisfaction. Although the new site scored higher than the old site, it was really interesting to look at what aspect of the new site contributed higher score.

Design
The new site scored higher in user satisfaction when it came to the design. The old site was so old, I'm sure no matter what you did, it would have scored higher. Measuring user satisfaction on site design is pretty interesting because how the site looks could totally affect page views and bounce rates on the site.

Navigation
Extensive amount of efforts were put into the the navigational elements of the site. Users felt the new site provided ease of use and better navigational experience. So the satisfaction index was fair. However, the site is about recipes, and it does not provide the best navigational experience there because the internal search and recipe search functionality were confusing in terms of design.

The search box was shared with internal and recipe search, and users had to select the proper tab to fulfill their mission.

From web analytics stand point, it was obvious that users were confused because the terms users entered into the box were recipe related for both internally searched terms and recipes searched.

Content
What is unfortunate about the new site is a lot of the recipes on the old site was taken out (Don't ask why...). Therefore a lot of the users who referred to the new site for the recipe from the old site did not find the recipe they wanted to acquire.

Web analytics showed higher referrals and direct entries to the home page, because users visiting the old recipe that no longer exist on the site would get redirected to the home page. That caused higher bounce rate on the home page as well.

Summary
The survey analysis showed overall satisfaction of the new site was supported by the new design. Fresh design with easier navigational experience contributed to fair level of satisfaction. The caveat is that there are design fatigue when users start to get use to the site. So it is likely that your user satisfaction with design will go down, if they keep on revisit your site.

It is imperative to take actions in delivering the changes required to increase your user satisfaction. These actionable insights acquired quantitatively and qualitatively allow you to decide that actions you need to take. Also forecasting how your site visitors will feel and consume content will give another sense of what you need to do.

Once, you make your changes, measure and assess your data again. Your satisfied users will likely to return to your site, and become your advocates. Good luck!!

* Pages per Vist = PPV

First of all, if you're getting a reaction to changes in PPV, that's probably better than getting no reaction or comment. However, it is important to come to an understanding with your counterparts that PPV could be a powerful metrics depending on how you look at it.

To me, it is quite useless if you just site there and look at this metric go up and down, and claim it as good or bad without any context or a goal.

Web site's goal and objective

Depending on what you're trying to accomplish with your web site, how you look at every metrics and KPI's would be different. In terms of PPV, what would be your bottom line?

How do you want your PPV to look like when you put your site's goal into consideration?

Case #1: Let's say you're going to run a mini-site to acquire site registrations, and attempt to market to those registrants later. It turns out you'll need a minimum of 3 pages to complete the registration process. In other words, reach the confirmation/thank you page.

Then ultimately, you'll like to see your PPV on this mini-site around 3~4. Obviously, if your PPV says 2, then people are probably not reaching the confirmation page. Time to look at the conversion funnel !!

Case #2: For news related site (like NYT, WSJ, Reuters, etc.), you can see PPV in many different ways. Because it is highly likely that these sites are monetizing through CPM based media ads, from that stand point, they may want to acquire a lot of PPV as much as possible. In that case, high PPV would be nice, but it is also important to assess different levels of PPV by various news categories.

If they're promoting related articles through artificial intelligence tool (IA, predictive modeling, etc.), then that will be another area where they would want to see multiple PPV as well. Setting goals for PPV by verticals or by different micro-objectives within a site would become important as well.

Translate that analysis and educate your users

From analysis stand point, each analysts are probably well educated enough to measure different level of PPV by looking at different dimensions (by source, site sections, etc.). However, your insights would need to be translated to others, so that they don't limit their views on PPV on one flat number in one dimension.

P.S.
I've encountered a site where PPV dropped 50% after the site relaunched, and it was due to multiple reasons, which was mostly attributed to better site design. It was a little challenging to translate to others that this "decline" was good. What's your story?

To give you a better sense of what it would mean to you and your site in context of web analytics, qualified visitors are site visitors that you identified as a desired target or lead.

Depending on your role and how you definite the business objective/goal of your site, qualified visitors could mean differently.

For example, if you're a webmaster, your qualified visitors could mean those who didn't hit the error pages. If you're a sales/acquisition manager, then number of leads or registrations acquired through the site could mean qualified visitors.

Now, the objective of this article is to explain how you would assess and analyze that qualified visitors, and obtain that percentage of qualified visitors on your site. This is what you need to do:

Create a visitor segmentation on your analytics tool

You need to understand what makes your traffic qualified, and come up with a rule so you can bucket those visitors into this segment.

Define a time frame for your data

This is important, because you'll be able to gauge your qualified traffic's trend against different seasons, marketing efforts, etc. The trend in both raw values of your qualified traffic and percentage of qualified traffic against different time frame will give you a well rounded understanding to the traffic trends.

Take the ratio between qualified visitors to overall site visitors

This is pretty straight forward... Not sure why I even highlighted this section...

So eventually, if you successfully segmented your traffic and capture all the necessary data, you'll be able to arrive to a chart like this. (This chart is based on some random data made up by myself)

In this case, it looks like the site acquired higher qualfied traffic around summer. Setting up a benchmark around overall average would be great start to see if the site is acquiring qualified traffic during a specific month.

Also if you can call out the marketing initiatives, you could probably contribute your efforts against the acquisition of your qualified traffic as well.

So this was a quick and simple method to gauge and assess your site visitors who falls under your rule of "Qualified Visitors". If you have any other ideas to obtain such insights, please feel free to share that with me.

There are many articles out there addressing "Long Tail" of keywords, and to assess all of the keywords that are under your Long Tail strategy requires huge amount of efforts.

One way to help you start initiating such research is by categorizing the key terms and graphing it out.

Here is an example of from a fictional blog site that writes about California in general.
The kewords listed in this chart would be hand picked by your analyst, based on key keywords that would be imporant to your site.

This chart tells me 50% of all searched terms from search engines contained a word "Event". Obviously, this will tell you that a lot of the search traffic are coming from event related terms. More than "Museum" or "Food" related terms.

This is nice to know because it also tells you how you are positioning the site's content. The opportunity for this site would be to write more relevent content pertaining to food and museums. Perhaps in San Francisco or Sacramento.

That new goal you set, will allow you to plan what content to write and re-position your site.

Web analytics could tell you which of the content on your site is popular based on traffic coming from different sources. With enphasis on search engine marketing, I'd like to discuss several different options for you to determine the content demand from your audience.

Traffic coming from search engines would obviously involve some keywords that users searched on Google, Yahoo!, Live, etc. Search engines would serve relevant content based on their complex algorithms and indexed pages (search engines' inventory). The majority of web analytics applications would be able to tell you what keywords users used to arrive to your site or pages. If you segment your traffic from search engines and view top content, you'll be able to see which of your site content has the most traffic from search.

If you're trying to use web analytics applications to determine what content to add or write about in the near future, I would be careful about few things. First, web analytics and referrals from search is only based on the pages that are available. Second, web analytics applications won't tell you the content demand, popular search keywords don't equate to a lot of people are searching for those topics.

To shed a little light on web analytics tools, perhaps you have a page writing about topic A, but you may coincidentally have many keywords within that page related to topic B. In that case, you could be lucky in a sense that users searching for topic B could end up on your page about topic A. Bounce rates for it could be high, but I would keep an eye on this aspect.

Opportunities
So what content should you add? Obviously, you're goals and objectives would be different when willing to add content on your site. Your goal or objective could be:

- Writing a blog (I would recommend you to keep on writing based on your passion and goals)

- Determine content to add on newsletter to avoid fatigue and increase consumer interests.

- Increase site traffic by adding relevant content for your audience.

- Simply out of idea, and want to know where to start.

- Increase traffic from the long-tail aspect of keywords from search.

Since this article enphasizes on search engines traffic, I would like to state SEO (search engine optimization) as a relevant method to increase traffic for current and upcoming pages. There are several tactics to consider if you're thinking about adding content to increase traffic from search engines.

1. Obviously, SEO. Make sure your SEO due diligence are well executed (Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, Linking across internal pages, seeding pages on social networking sites, update your site map xml for better indexing, etc.).

After doing the basic SEO practices, I was able to double (even more for some sites) site traffic from search. Be aware of black-hat methods and stick to the basics first. Tweak your site little by little and you'll notice the difference soon.

2. Run surveys, polls, quizzes, etc. Your users would be able to tell you what they like and what they don't like. Depending on how you question your users, they can tell what they want to know more about.

It's amazing to hear directly from your users, it can't get better than raw voices. This may be limited to the way you ask your users, but it would be a tactic you want to execute.

3. Research online. There are so many ways to research and even know what to research on. However, leverage what's available online to see what topics are hot in your industry, has buzz, sites with many traffic, etc. This can inspire you on what to write next and generate new traffic opportunities. Seasonal or annual events would be great way to look at in order to guess what users would be searching for and want to read.

4. Utilize tools available from search engines. I personally love Google tools such as Google Webmaster Tools, Search Insights, Google Trends, and advance search filters on Google. These tools would definitely open your eyes on keywords that could potentially give you an idea to new topics/content to add on your site.

Google webmaster tools would allow you to mitigate your duplicated page titles or meta descriptions, and understand what keywords your site is showing up, but not getting many click-throughs, etc. Additionally, Google Search Insight would give you raising keywords related to the terms you're researching on.

5. Add content and measure. Track what kinds of content are available and understand what you added or wrote on your site.

That spike in traffic could be that new article you wrote on XYZ. Maybe you can write more about that to give more contexts and opportunities for your reader to think and comment.

So far, there were 27 users who have completed the survey that asked:

1. Based on today's visit, how would you rate your site experience overall?

2. Which of the following best describes the primary purpose of your visit?

3. Were you able to complete the purpose of your visit today?

4. What do you value most about the [company] website? (asked when answered yes on Q3)

5. Please tell us why you were not able to fully complete the purpose of your visit today? (asked when answered yes on Q3)

The results that came out this survey was very insightful and powerful. I was able to get better insight to the qualitative aspect on how this site is performing beyond numbers from Google Analytics.

Here is what I felt after using this wonderful tool.

1) I was glad to see the overall satisfaction score in the Green. Fu~.

2) Avinash is right, there are people out there who care, and are willing to give feedbacks.

3) User comments were a bit hard to find, because you need to click on the underlined %s, but it was one of the most powerful part of this survey, which is hearing users' raw comments. (I recommend downloading the csv file to see the comments in better view)

4) I've learned that my readers were happy with the content on my site, but it seems like a lot of them are looking for research related content. I guess I need to be more conscious about that aspect of needs, and potentially share more data centrics research. I'll do my best!!

5) I was surprise to find quite a few users selecting "Ask an expert" for their primary purpose of visit, but I have to say my site is not doing well in providing a clear communication path to myself (I only get few direct contact...).

6) Although we can set the survey's invitation rate, it'll be nice to have a setting so that the survey (participate in survey yes/no) would show up after a user visit the second page. This probably has to do with usability more than any other reason.

7) One thing I would recommend is to increase the time range of downloadable CSV file. Since we're able to select 7days to 6 months worth of data in the report, it'll be nice to have an option to download 6months worth of data in one CSV file as well.

Overall, I am very happy with this service, I think the implementation was strait forward (copy and paste the javascript code), and it was very simple to get an insight to your user satisfaction score including their comments. I highly recommend this service to anyone who is running a site or blog, and obtain an eye opening results.

Note: You can control the rate of invitation, and control the looks of the survey as well.

Here is the actual visual of my 4Q Iperceptions result:

Companies that have online business and offline business can use web analytics as a tool to integrate both types of business. Web Analytics applications can also help companies to measure the results of their traditional print advertising campaigns. It does not make sense to spend money on offline advertising without knowing the percentage of return we get as a result of our advertisement campaigns. For all those who were worried about how to track your offline business campaigns, here is the right solution. Web Analytics will help you out of this situation. We can measure and analyze the effect of our advertisement through Web Analytics. Here are certain ways to increase your revenue by integrating both online and offline business.

The key to integrate online and offline business is tracking your offline campaigns through link tagging. You can measure the offline advertising success exactly the same way as you measure online advertising success through this method. For this, you have to tag the links in your offline ads with the campaign variables used by your web analytics tool. For link tagging you need not put some archaic URL in your offline advertisements. You have to put some simple easy to remember URL in your offline advertisement. The best practice is to create a custom URL or a custom landing page. It will work better than attaching the campaign variables to the URL that you place in your offline advertisements.

When a customer looks for the advertised custom URL or custom landing page, then you should do a page redirect. It will help in tracking the variables. This process helps you to tag your offline campaigns like your online campaigns. In the same web analytics report now, you will be able to view the traffic and conversion for both of your online and offline campaigns. An important thing to note here is that if you publicize your custom URL in other places, then you will end up in driving the traffic that was not generated from your offline campaign. This will naturally reduce the results you want to get.

Example
You can use a friendly URL that is easy to remember http://www.xyz.com/promo, and use a redirect to output a URL with query parameters that are consumable by your analytics tool. Here is an article containing some examples to track campaign through Google analytics.

Web analytics reports help you to know whether your campaign has worked out or not. It will help you to analyze the major pitfalls and will give you a clear idea of how to improve your business, both offline and online. The greatest advantage here is that the steps taken by you will be entirely based on practical data and not mere guesswork.

Custom URLs are also known as vanity URLs or friendly URLs. They are catchy versions of the old, long, boring URL, which makes it easy for the customers to remember. It is the user-friendly version. You can make use of the help of Google URL builder to set up such URLs. It is useful when you have specific offers for your visitors. Unique URLs will lead to the specific landing page that has the offer.

The next best practice for integrating your offline and online business is to use redirects. It is a way to point URL A to URL B. The best method of redirect is using a "301 redirect". All that the redirect tends to say is that the page you are looking for at the URL A is at the URL B. 301 redirects are heavily used in SEO to make sure that when you rename your URL doesn't affect your page ranking in search engines.

From the market level view of your Web Analytics reporting you can infer whether your particular ad is affecting a particular market. It means that your products are better selling in those markets if they have a high correlation of website metrics .You can improve your business in other less performing markets by changing your marketing strategy according to your web analytics report.

It is also a best practice to run an ad words campaign alongside with your offline campaigns in order to capture the customers who search online in reference to your offline ad. Include keywords in your ad words campaign like the themes or phrases used in your offline ad. This will definitely increase ways to integrate and promote your site through offline channels.

Google Analytics support e-commerce site, and the reports from e-commerce is really helpful in a sense that it can tie the metrics in terms of dollar value. It provides an insight into the e-commerce activity on your website, and better understands the success of your e-commerce site. Conversion rate, average order value, revenue, transactions are some of the main reports of this section that determine your website activity.

There are reports for various sections which include traffic (visitors), traffic sources, content, goal conversion, and e-commerce. The reports under these sections could be added to you dashboard to get an overall look, in one screen, at the metrics that matter most to you.

Google analytics has recently introduced the customs reports. They are those reports, which you create, save and edit to give you a specific view of the data. With the help of these, you can determine which information and metrics you want to see. You can organize them in the way you want to highlight the relevant data by using drag and drop interface. You also have the option to create a tab if you want to see related data in other dimension of metrics. In addition, when you create the custom report, you'll have the option in creating a drill-down or multiple levels of sub-reports, by selecting the sub-dimension.

Certain features and functions of Google Analytics reporting that are very useful that I recommend you to take full advantage of:

• Export: Google Analytics has an export feature that allows you to download the reports in PDF, XML, CSV, and TSV. Certain reports may only allow PDF or XML. These downloads will give you the flexibility to cater the reports to your users in different ways. You can pass along the PDF file without altering it, or pass XML into other reporting tools in a form of data-feed, or manipulate CSV file and enhance the reports/charts as you wish.
• Time frame: Setting the time frame is one of the most important feature when reporting out of Google Analytics, because you able to select your reporting period grouping the data by day, weeks, or months. It is easy to select the day, date or month you desire by the calendar interface. You can also compare a date, date range to another date, or date range by choosing the "compare to past" option. This helps you to know the performance trends on your site before and after a change made on your site or landing pages. The interface also provides you with a timeline feature, which shows you a bar graph of visits over time. A particular range can be selected which gives you a graphic representation of the fluctuations in your report.
• Email: This is a great feature when you want to share your data, reports, or dashboards to certain people by email. You can send a report instantly or schedule the report run and email it on a daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly basis. If you are sending out to a group of users, you may want to consider creating a group account email address so your IT admin can control the email list when a member leaves the company or what not (Google Analytics will only have that one group email address set).
• View/Chart options: There a several options to represent the data in various ways. Some options are ordinary table view, pie chart, bar graph, etc. Most reports contains a pie chart, a basic table vie and bar graphs. An extra highlight is the trend graph that is in default mode in most of the reports. It gives you a snapshot view of your site's performance for various data points like conversion rate, bounce rate , visits etc.
• Dashboards: a dashboard is a collection of various reports. You can add a favorite report on your dashboard for a quick look into the site performance. It shows you a snapshot view of the reports that is customizable. Handy and quick access to your entire data of your favorite reports is the greatest advantage of dashboards.
• Advanced segmentation: It is the recent development of Google Analytics, which help you to segment the data to get a better insight into it. I recommend setting up advanced segmentations and utilize the segmentations against the custom reporting to take advantage or your useful reports with meaningful metrics to you.

Some advanced segmentation I've set up when the feature was first enabled were, Engaged Audience and Not-Engaged Audience segmentations. This is simply to show the difference in performance from those two segments against the reporting metrics you choose to run. Engaged Audience will defer for all of you, but you can say, visitors who did not bounce and spent on your site more than the one minute, and had 4 page views per visit. Not-Engaged Audience could be visitors who bounced and spend on your site less than 30 seconds (this is just an example). When you use these segmentations against your traffic sources or site sections, you'll definitely gain some great insights.

This may give you a clear picture of the power that you will possess if you will combine your Google website optimizer and Google Analytics tools. In this article, we'll talk about things to consider for such a combination.

Overview - Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a robust analytics application, which reports key information of your site traffic and their behavior. It will provide you with this information in the form of a variety of easily understandable reports. Thus, Google Analytics gives you an insight into the user behavior on your site. The information that we obtain from Google Analytics will be helpful in making the right decisions to maximize the website performance. The best thing is that you can open a Google Analytics account absolutely free. You can perform your analysis on the visitor data this tool provides according to your online business needs.

Overview - Google Website Optimizer

Now let us look at what Google Website Optimizer has in store for you. Google Website Optimizer helps you to conduct statistical tests on your sites' pages that enhance the effectiveness of your site. Every site has a goal to achieve. It may be to purchase a product, donate to a cause or take a survey. The goal of your site depends upon the nature of your website. Website Optimizer can track the nature of visitor performance by virtue of Google Analytics. It gives you information about the conversion rate i.e. the number of visitors behaved according to your predefined goals. The tool is primarily focused on giving analyst the solution to conduct A/B tests or multivariate testing on your site's layout and designs.

To make best use of the valuable data obtained from Google Analytics, it is necessary to utilize it together with Google Website Optimizer. Google Website Optimizer will empower you to create and run specific tests regarding the website content in order to increase the conversion rate and thus improve your visitor satisfaction. All of us are aware of the fact that an improvement in visitor satisfaction is the highlighting point of the best performing websites. Thus, Google Website Optimizer helps you to convert the information provided by Google Analytics into action, which guarantees the best result. Website optimizer is accessed through the Google Website Optimizer (http:www.google.com/websiteoptimizer).

The variables on which you can conduct experiments through Google Website Optimizer are innumerable. You can run tests on the variables such as changing the page background color, testing different ad copy, different images, different headlines, different positioning, and different layouts and designs to the combination of size and location buttons, trust logos, affiliation links, etc.

Basic combination of the two powerful web tools of analytics and optimization:

By integrating Google Analytics tool into your Website Optimizer, you will get a rich data and will give you insight into the progress of your tests. To cut the matter short, while Google Analytics inform you about what is happening on your site, Google Website Optimizer gives you the power to change your site for increased conversion rates.

To get the best results out of the two, you should combine both the tools in the best effective way. Here are some ways to do it.

• The landing page content definitely creates a positive or negative impact on the visitors. It plays an important role in determining the visitor activity. If your landing page provides what the visitor needs then it can result in an increase in the conversion rate. If you optimize your website's low traffic pages, it will not give you any positive outcome. You should optimize a high traffic landing pages that show a high bounce rate. Google Analytics will help you in this task. For this purpose, analyze the "Top landing pages" report within the content section of Google Analytics. Pages that have the high bounce rate and the highest percentage of entrances should be redesigned. Bounce rate is the number of visitors who retract their steps within a short time span. Thus, from the data obtained from Google Analytics use Google Optimizer to redesign your site and help to increase the web traffic.
• Focus on your funnel pages: Funnel pages are those pages that lead your visitors to your goal pages. Visitors finally will enter the goal page, once they have completed the desired steps such as registering on your site, a purchase or a download. In Google Analytics, you can determine up to ten pages in a defined funnel depending upon the path you want them to take as to reach the goal page. The "Funnel visualization" report within the goals section of Google Analytics shows you the trend of the visitors who have excited in between on the path to the goal page. Thus, pages that lose a high percentage of traffic on the path towards goal should be the next perfect part on your site to conduct optimization test.

These steps will definitely provide a good working of both the tools, Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer combined. If you work according to the information and take necessary steps by using both these tools, you could expect a better web traffic and high monetary gains.

Possible testing strategies you can consider conducting:

• Time on page as a conversion goal


• Advanced A/B Testing


• Experimenting with dynamic content


• Tracking all movement past the landing page


• Improve your newsletter subscription rate


• Fractional versus Full Factorial analysis


• Experiment with site-wide changes


• Comparing old vs. new website designs


• Testing the same section across many pages


• Testing many sections across multiple pages


• Counting a conversion when a link is clicked


• A simple solution to cross-domain tracking


• Counting a conversion when a form is submitted

WARNING!!!
What you need to aware of when installing Website Optimizer code when you have Google Analytics code already set in place.

According to Google (in website optimizer help):
If your web pages are tagged with Google Analytics' ga.js tracking code, we suggest modifying that code for use with Website Optimizer, rather than adding a call to urchin.js as well. Calling two essentially similar JavaScript files to be downloaded onto the user's machine is inefficient, and can slow down loading of your pages (although only very slightly).

Note that Website Optimizer doesn't currently validate pages using ga.js, so you'll either need to skip validation for multivariate experiments, or validate your A/B experiments with the urchin.js tracking code before switching to ga.js. Also, any modifications to the tracking code (such as those required to cross domains) increase the level of complexity, so we suggest that less-technical users continue to use urchin.js for both Google Analytics and Website Optimizer.

You definitely need to consult with your tech team and make sure that implementing Website Optimizer won't affect your current trackings or metrics data.

Additionally, there may be issues around integrating Website Optimizer when you're tracking an e-commerce site using Google Analytics. Website Optimizer may affect your e-commerce data and pollute your numbers. Check out the Google Website Optimizer Forum (http://groups.google.com/group/websiteoptimizer) and scope out your requirements prior to making tracking changes.

So for you bloggers and website owners out there, who are using Google Analytics and wish to track your site traffic from RSS or Atom feeds, try the following steps:

1. Identify your template within your blog CMS tool where the RSS or Atom feeds are generated.
2. Use Google's link builder tool to create the query parameters to attach at the end of your URL defined in the XML file. For example: http://www.zoommetrix.com/rss.xml?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication
3. After you set the query parameters into your URL within your xml file, publish or refresh your xml file.
4. If you get an error, you may want to change "&" to "&" so that the browser can render the entity properly.
5. Access your Google Analytics report, and go to Traffic Sources > Campaigns. You should be able to get the traffic data attributing to people who visited your site via RSS or XML feeds.

(1) Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)

KPIs provide a detailed data of the nature of our progress towards achieving the objectives of the organization. It will help us to re-establish our goals according to the analytics report of the KPIs.

It depends upon the nature of your site to select the significant KPIs. The basic KPIs in Google Analytics are covered in detail here. It is important to note that the KPIs that work for a particular site may not work for another site.

If you are looking for a general definition of KPIs supported by the Web Analytics Association, refer to Website's KPI Examples and Definitions - Basics

Number of visits
It studies the number of visits on a site over a specific time period. Most people analyses this KPI on a regular basis. The best practice is to set a target for this KPI, say, for over a period of one month. Try to improve your marketing strategy to achieve your aimed web traffic for the fixed period. This KPI is related to the web traffic and the majority of the web business is much concerned about its value. You should give your maximum talent to increase the value of this KPI to meet your targets. Give more attention to the trends in the visitor numbers in relation to your targets.

Pageviews
Pageviews is the total number of pages viewed on your site and is a general measure of how much your site is used. It is more useful as a basic indicator of the traffic load on your site and server rather than as a marketing measure.

Absolute Unique Visitors
"Absolute Unique Visitors" is how many visitors (people) came to your site, counting each person only once for the entire time period. Google Analytics seem to use IP adresse + User Agent + First Party Cookies to identify a visitor. Unique visitor is an ultimate measure to reflect the number of people that visited your site.

Bounce rate
Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren't relevant to your visitors. You can minimize Bounce Rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.

High bounce rate means that the visitor was not attracted by the attributes of your site and visitors retracted their steps. The satisfaction of visitors is what matters here most. The main reason for this phenomenon is inappropriate content according to their taste on the landing page, unalluring design and technical problems.

It is clear from the above description that lower bounce rate is the indication of the success of your online marketing strategies. Your website is functioning in the best possible way according to your best efforts. Try to analyze the data of the bounce rate based on the trends in a given period of time rather than on daily basis, and by content or pages. A point to be noted here is that higher bounce rate does not always show a poor website performance. For example, in the case of blogs, a visitor may be directed to your website to read only a particular article in a particular page.

Time on site
Time on Site is one way of measuring visit quality. If visitors spend a long time visiting your site, they may be interacting extensively with it. However, Time on Site can be misleading because visitors often leave browser windows open when they are not actually viewing or using your site.

Conversion rate
For a non-ecommerce site, Conversion Rate is the primary metric for assessing how well marketing, site, and content work together to achieve business objectives. Conversion Rate is the percentage of visits that result in the visitor taking an action that you have defined as important to your business.

Every website is created with a pre-defined goal. It may be of various natures such as to contact the organization, to fill in a registration form or to purchase a product. In the case of blogs the goal may be to subscribe to the RSS feed. Thus, goals differ.

Conversion rate is an effective KPI that help to monitor the goals of the website. It is the rate at which the visitors take your goals or positive measures. If you have a high conversion rate, then it indicates that you have made a considerable amount of customers act according to your wishes in your website. To manage a high conversion rate your site should have the perfect mix of quality web traffic, an excellently managed customer experience or the right product offerings as a business.

The conversion rate KPI extracts the best value of such good measures. Google Analytics provide you with enormous stats of all the factors that affect the conversion rate. If you make improvements to your customer experience, your conversion rate will really improve. Blaming your low conversion rate on low traffic volume or the particular period of the year is bad practice.

Traffic sources
Google Analytics traffic sources report provides an overview of the different kinds of sources that send traffic to your site. The graph shows traffic trends; the pie-chart and tables show the traffic sources driving the trends. "Direct Traffic" is visits from people who clicked a bookmark to come to your site or who typed your site URL directly into their browser. "Referring Sites" shows visits from people who clicked to your site from another site. "Search Engines" shows visits from people who clicked to your site from a search engine result page.

Now, search engines marketing is on the top list of online marketing. Most of the organizations try hard to move up the search engine rankings for a better web traffic. This KPI will analyze the nature of the sources from which your web traffic has arrived on your sites. Depending entirely on search engines is a risky thing. If we depend on search engines for 90% of web traffic, then think about the day, suppose, when Google modify their algorithm or may remove your company from their database. This will put a sudden stop to your major revenue share. Therefore, it is better to increase your traffic from all sources including the small traffic sources over time. It will help you to stand in the long run. Make sure that your Google Analytics report of traffic sources should not show any source of traffic dominating for a long period, unless it is part of your strategies.

Keywords data shows the actual keywords used in search that referred traffic to the site. Additionally, Google Analytics is capable of segmenting the keywords by paid, non-paid (organic), and overall. Carefully monitor how your added or changed content affects the keywords searched over a period of time.

E-commerce
Google Analytics is great for tracking e-commerce transactions. There are various KPIs under e-commerce report, and it will help you measure your site's success to your revenue and sales over time.

Here are some KPIs under e-commerce are:

Total Revenue: Revenue is determined by the number of purchases and the average purchase value. Some important steps you can take to maximize revenue are:

Purchase targeted advertising and write effective ads (see the Traffic Sources reports)
Make sure your landing pages show the information, services, or products that you promise in your ads (review the Content reports to help minimize bounce rates)
Simplify your conversion funnels so that fewer would-be customers abandon the checkout process (review the Goals reports)
Conversion Rate: This report shows the rate at which visits to your site result in purchases. Tracking conversion rates over time is an effective way of determining whether your marketing and website are becoming more or less efficient at turning visitors into customers. Note that conversion rates are most useful as company-specific benchmarks against which to assess marketing and site effectiveness because conversion rates vary considerably across businesses (even within the same industry).

Average Order Value: Tracking changes to the average order value over time is important to catalog sites that may change and shift which products and services they are actively marketing. Many ecommerce sites monitor this metric to see if cross promotions are working. This is an important metric that works its way into many higher level executive and shareholder reports.

Product Overview (Product Performance): How much of each product do you sell? This report shows the number of items sold, the total revenue, the average price, and the average order quantity for each product you sell online. Click any SKU to drill down and view detail.

Product SKUs (Product Performance): This report shows the number of items for each SKU sold, the total revenue, the average price, and the average order quantity for each product you sell online.

Categories (Product Performance): How much of each product category, product, and SKU do you sell? For ecommerce sites, understanding which products are selling online is crucial for generating relevant content, promotions and advertisements. This report shows the number of items sold, the total revenue, the average price, and the average order quantity for each product you sell online.

Transactions: This report is a list of all transactions on your site, useful for auditing your transactions.

Visits to Purchase: How many visits does it take for visitors to purchase? Understanding your sales cycle is important to the overall success of your site. This report helps you understand how many visits it takes to convert your visitors into customers and, by extension, the kind of content you need to create in order to reach your prospects.

Time to Purchase: How long does it take before visitors make a purchase? Understanding your sales cycle is important to the overall success of your site. This report helps you understand how long it takes to convert your visitors into customers and, by extension, the kind of content you need to create in order to reach your prospects.

KPIs are a revelation in the sense that they inform us about our success or failures in our path to achieve the objectives. KPIs are the main criteria for determining the website activity and help us to take the necessary steps for boosting up the online marketing initiatives.

I hope you acquired a better understanding of these KPIs from Google Analyitcs to make your site better and successful.

Reference: Google - http://www.google.com/support/analytics/

(Key Performance indicators) for e-commerce sites. It is mainly concerned with the orders, conversion rates, transactions and revenue of e-commerce sites. Non e-commerce sites are generally outlooked in the more prominent world of e-commerce websites. For all the non e-commerce website owners, here are some KPIs that are concerned with non e-commerce websites.

Before going into detail, let us consider the definition of non e-commerce websites. They are either lead generation sites or pure content sites, where visitors come for the sake of consuming content and they leave without any business transactions. It can be a technical support site, a blog, a site full of white papers, a social networking site or a brand website. Here there is a pack of contents and still there is no online outcome, which the e-commerce sites are looking for. Now, let us have a look into the major KPIs that satisfies the executive managers of non e-commerce website.

Visitor loyalty:
It is defined as the frequency of visits on your website for a specific time period. You will get the data for the average visits per visitor. For increasing the visitor loyalty for your site, set a target of a particular number of visitors that you should achieve over a specific time period and analyze the trends of your progress towards the goal set by you.

Compare your performance over period and ensure that you are making progress in achieving the predefined percentage of web traffic. It will help you know about the characteristics of your visitors. You should update your website frequently depending upon web analytics for increased web traffic.

Recency:
It is the number of repeated visits on your website. It is up to you to decide your goals regarding the recency of visitors. The greater the recency of visits, the better for your site.

If you have set the target of the recency of visits KPIs to be one day ago, it means that you want visitors to visit your site every day to enjoy the so-called valuable content on your site.

It is the normal set target for a news site or a job site. Here you will become more advantageous of the repeat visits. This will help you to know whether your site is performing well or not. If your web analytics data shows that your 67% of audience consist of new visits, then it is time to improvise upon you site content, merchandising and design. If you create incentives for repeated visitors, then sure you can enjoy success and measure your success through web analytics.

Length of visit:
It refers to the quality of visits during a reporting period depending upon how long each visit lasts. It is the most common and the most prominent KPIs used in non e-commerce sites. If by analyzing your web analytics report, you get a clear picture of the distribution of this KPI, then it is easier to proceed further. Suppose your site could increase this KPI if you make them stay on your website for one minute long, then take measures to convert more visits into a successful one by engaging your customers.

Give importance to the visitor satisfaction and they will definitely stay with you for a long period and even until eternity. Identify your own goals and measure this KPI for success.

Depth of visit:
It is mainly concerned with the number of pages consumed by your visitor in the reporting time period. It is important to note that most of the websites are now web pages and not a single page. It is more powerful than the average page views per visitor. It helps us to have a broad picture of our customer experience. Here also it helps to improve our goals and measure success.

Conversions (Site Registrations, Viewed Contact Us, Survey Participation, etc.):
Conversions may not ring the bell for those who are running non e-commerce sites, but you may have registrations page for users to receive newsletters, contact forms to contact the owner of the site, or surveys to ask your users important questions that matter to you.

These valuable actions that you may want your users to take are conversions, and it is highly recommended to tweak your analytics tools to measure these conversions and monitor its drop offs through funnels.

Thus, these are the important KPIs to be noted in a non e-commerce site. If you give importance to them then you could not only dream success but also experience it. Here are a few recommendations for the actions taken according to your web analytics data obtained

• Positively work with your goals measured against this KPIs.
• Segment the data. It will give you the key insights of how to drive the web traffic on your site. Find out the key words that drive the valuable segment of traffic to your website. Find out the most important acquisition sources for visitor loyalty and length of visit. Analyze the nature of content people with long visits consume. By this type of segmentation, you can reach your destination i.e. the measures for improvement.

All these valuable KPIs will definitely help you to increase the quality of traffic in your site and make it a better performing site with increased number of visitors who are loyal to you.

Before installing Google Analytics, you should have a discussion with your IT team and key business stakeholders, and sort out all the matters regarding the subject. You should have a better idea at the end of your discussion about the following points:

• Whether your site have multiple domains.
• Whether your site have multiple sub domains. You should be able to distinguish between multiple domains and multiple sub domains.
• Whether you should be provided with the reports of all of your sub domains packed up into a single report or separately.
• Whether you prefer to discard internal traffic from your web analytics report.
• You should also be aware of the default document of your site.
• Also select the four most important web pages in your site, visiting which can be concluded as a successful visit.

Through an in-depth discussion with your teams all the details regarding the above should be clearer. Now let us look at how to set up an account and the best practices involved in using Google Analytics.

1) The first step is to create a new Google Analytics account. If you already have a Google account, then it is a bit easier. In addition, it would nice to integrate your ad words account (if have one), since it can be linked up to analytics account on an account to account basis. If you do not have an analytics account, then never mind, you can sign up in the Google analytics site.

2) The next step is to configure the profiles created. Even after you sign up, nothing is configured yet and so it is your task to edit the account. In order to configure your default document, you should know the default document of your site. The earlier session with your IT team will come for your rescue here.

3) Create the required filters: In order to segment the data of web analytics create filters according to your requirements. For example if you have multiple sub domains, then create a filter, which makes it easier for Google to recognize your multiple sub domains. If you want to discard internal traffic, then create a filter for such a requirement. The recommended thing is to create an additional profile with the above-mentioned filter. This is better than applying your external traffic filter to all of your profiles because this won't let you know the quantity of internal traffic contributing to your key metrics.

4) Configure your goals: If you don't pre-plan your work in Google Analytics, then it will consume your time. A good insight about the concerned subject really helps us to work better with Google Analytics. In order to create goals, consider the criteria for a successful visit in terms of your monetary gains. For example, for a successful visit in a particular site, the criteria may be whether the visitor signs a newsletter or e-mail an article to a friend. Make the possible ways to connect your goals with actual pages on the site. After setting up the criteria, Google will help in configuring your goals.

5) Tag your pages: If your site is a single domain, then it is not needed. You just have to copy the codes provided by Google. If your site possesses multiple domains, then tag your pages, which will help you track the web traffic.

6) Tag all pages: The main problem with Google Analytics is that it may not be able to track all your pages. It is a much harder task to accomplish. Therefore, you should make it clear that you tag all your pages. All of your pop-up pages and all your external pages should be tagged. The main problem if you don't tag these pages is that if you set your goals against these pages then these pages will not be tracked for your web analytics task. Therefore, it is better to tag all your pages and avoid pitfalls.

7) Tags should be placed at the bottom of the pages. They should not be placed at the top or in the header or any other place. This is the best practice of using tags in web analytics. However, lately, there are analysts who recommends putting the tracking after the header, since some custom tracking requires the .js file to be called prior to custom tracking. Check out your requirements and technical implications with your IT team.

8) Tags should not be placed inside borders, tables, or frames. The correct position of tags will help you to get a precise data for your reports.

9) Should have knowledge about your unique page identity. Now websites have become more dynamic in the way they react to specific customers and how they personalize content. Know about the combination of file name and criteria that give your page its unique identity and make your web analytics tool more effective by providing it with this valuable information.

10) Make the intelligent use of cookies: Three types of information are collected by your Google Analytics tool. They are mainly source attributes, page attributes and user attributes.

Source attributes is mainly concerned with the path of your visitors to your website, i.e. whether they have entered your site from other websites, campaigns or search engines.

Page attributes looks at the quantity and nature of pages consumed by your visitors. User attributes is concerned with the identity of your visitor, i.e. if they have logged in or not.

User attributes are stored up in the cookies. Your tags will help you to read the information collected in your cookies much easier. Therefore, you should use your cookies intelligently.

11) Overcome the problem of JavaScript wrapper: Normally the links on your site are covered up in JavaScript. Due to this, if you want to know the click density, you might not be able to get the number of clicks in the report due to JavaScript. So the best practice is to use JavaScript wrapper only when you can't absolutely avoid it.

They are also having a hard time in taking the right decision from the various reports quickly. The main reason for this hardship is their incapability to identify the key metrics that are the powerhouse of their business. As a result, they are unable to take the right measures for the quick progress. Thus, it is clear from here that unavailability of data or the right kind of data is not the main problem. The problem that underlies is the incapability to identify the most important effective metrics. In short, we are short of resources to analyze our business performance.

At such context, the significance of dashboards comes into our focus area. Dashboards are our customizable collection of report summaries. They provide us with the critical data pertaining to our business performance quickly, easily, precisely and in the best understandable form. This helps us to decide the goals for our business and take quick and the right driving measures. If you have the required skills to use your dashboards in the best possible way, then they prove out to be the greatest communication medium.

Dashboards can vary by industry and business functions. However, there are certain commonly followed best practices related to dashboards. Following this, will surely give you a better sense to deliver the key insights, and translate the performance and effectiveness of your site through dashboards. Here are the best practices...

Show the context in your dashboard:
There is no metric that can exist in isolation without the context. It will only give you a set of numbers, which will be hard for you to configure out into the related information. If you place your metrics in the contexts then it will definitely give you quick insights rather than a bunch of questions regarding the data. It is easy to show contexts in your dashboard. You can use internal and external benchmarks, goals and prior performance as a context. Without the context, your metrics will not give you the sort out value even if it is the most critical metric for your business. The purpose of the goal in your dashboard is to communicate the performance and to improvise your actions for the required results. Segmentation is the most effective way to access key insights regarding your good or bad performance.

Pick out the critical few metrics:
You may be aware of the fact that dashboards are not merely one page, but 28 tab excel files or 34 slide PowerPoint decks. As a result, these track all of the metrics regardless of their relevance. It makes more difficult to have the accurate understanding of the significant points and makes us in a confused state relating to the required actions. You should have a brainstorming session to grasp the few key metrics significant for your business. If you succeed in figuring out this difficult issue, then it will really give your dashboard the perfect decision making power.

The rule for selecting the key metrics is that they should be less than 10. If they are greater, then it will be less effective. You should identify a goal for each of these selected few, segment it, and display the goals and metrics in your dashboard.

Take special efforts to include insights in your dashboard:
In the absence of a set of insights that make you available with performance information and the driving action, your dashboard will merely turn into a set of graphs, numbers and statistics. These insight freer dashboards leave everything to the intelligence and capability of the reader. If you provide insights, then it will illuminate the thought process of the reader quickly to take the right action.

So include a session in the top of the dashboard to highlight your insights. The insights may range from the reasons for the hits and misses, the underlying causes for the shifts in the business and the root causes. The recommendations you share on the dashboard can be relating to our next action, the new merging horizon of opportunity, or the method to reverse the decline. This will increase your senior executive's skill to take the right decision without having to go through all the unattractive statistics.

Single page for your dashboards give you the best results:
You should realize the power of the single page dashboard. If your dashboard is not single page, then it is not a dashboard but a report. Single page is the best practice since it is packed up with advantages. It helps to make dashboards present the data in the neatest manner with only the required data and not an overflow of data. It makes data presentation easier, enhances the understandability of it, and of course, makes it portable. It also promotes much hard work in choosing the few critical metrics.

Constantly evolve and stay relevant:
Dashboards should not be made into a permanent outdated thing. In this world of change, help in the evolution of your dashboards. Metrics should be eliminated as soon as it loses its relevance. As the web changes at least a few of your key metrics will change according with it. So plan the evolution of your dashboard. Otherwise, your dashboard will consume your enormous time without giving you the perfect value.

All these actions will definitely make a positive output to your business and audience.

How to create advanced segments

Google Analytics always had great segmentation capabilities. However, the task needed sophisticated thinking to segment the data. When filters were used, it was a hectic job to create different filters for each profile. With the help of advanced segmentation, the segment created can be used in multiple profiles. Moreover, advanced segmentation is completely at your service. It is up to you to consider which types of visit you prefer to segment while you generate the data for a specific report.

By an analysis of the report provided by advanced segmentation, you can have quite a precise insight into the exact nature of web traffic in your site. It will help you to concentrate more on the weak segments and thus help you to increase the traffic as well as your income.

Advanced segmentation helps us to identify the prominent trends and common behaviour in web page traffic. Thus advanced segmentation is all set to challenge your dreams about the possibilities of Google Analytics.

Google has created a superb interface that helps you to drag and drop dimensions or metrics that you prefer to use in your segment. Advanced segments are of two types namely default segments created by Google and custom segments, which you could create. If you wish to segment a specific metric or dimension, choose the one, specify a value for the chosen metric or dimension and form a relationship between the two.

For Example:
If you want to analyze why certain visits last only for a few second, then create an advanced segment to view all the visits that has lasted only for ten seconds.
The next step is to choose the Time on site metric and drag it to the right position. You should also specify a condition for the above metric to meet and a value. Here, the condition is Time on site metric "to be greater than ten seconds". If you want to create a custom segment other than the default segments, you just have to type in your requirement and then click "create segment". The new custom segment is created which will help you with your specific requirement.

Another important feature of advanced segmentation is value field, which is a dynamic field that updates you with all your potential values while you type. It will provide you with all values collected for the metric or dimension used in the segment. We can add more metrics and dimensions to our advanced segment. When we apply it to a profile, the profile will be segmented. Thus, we can use the advanced segments in any profile. It helps us to improve our knowledge of how multiple campaigns, medium or geographic segments perform over time. A detailed study of the analytics and acting according to it can increase additional insights to the traffic behavior.

You can also test the segment you have created. It is a distinguishing feature of Google Analytics. You just have to click on the test segment and Google Analytics will search within the time limit you have chosen.

Before going into a detailed report of the working of advanced segmentation, let us consider two important concepts in analytics namely, dimensions and metrics.

Dimensions refer to the properties of site visitors or the visits created by them. Keyword, campaign are some examples of dimensions.
Metrics refer to the basic counts that take place on the website. Page views, visits, revenues and transactions are some examples of metrics.

How to create advanced segments

Potential usage of the new advanced segmentation

- It helps you to have an in-depth knowledge of the nature of visits in your website.

- It helps you to know how many visitors enter your site accidentally or by their preference and knowledge. We can call the second category visitors as loyal visitors. This helps us to analyze the types of pages the loyal visitors consume. You can know specific customer trends by creating an advanced segment.

- In a tech support site, you can know whether visitors have found the right tech support answer. If you want to know, whether visitors coming by grand keywords on a social networking site are loyal or not, it is also possible by advanced segmentation.

- Advanced segmentation helps you to know the segment of visitors was converted into potential goals. The key visits, traffic sources, content reports, etc.; all are at your fingertips. All these reports help you to increase your monetary gains.

- The best usage of advanced segmentation is that you could segment your most valuable customers. It is great advantage for all those people who do onsite business, i.e. who are always on the look out for potential buyers on their sites. You can study the new trends in customer visits, which make you capable to increase your site earnings.

- You can also identify your precious customers. In e-commerce, advanced segmentation is really helpful.

- Engaged vs. Not Engages Traffic: Set criterias that will separate the two types of visitors, and compare against each other to find additional insights to what and where are the visitors engaged or not.

Advanced segmentation helps you better understand the site visitors and it brings granular insights to what is happening on the site, so you can make better decisioins to optimize your site and strategies.

The important aspect when comparing two of these users is their intent on the content or for search. It is likely that users on a site for a specific content is consuming the information and observing what he/she wants or wanted to know. For users searching with keywords in hopes to find the right content or information that is relevant to their search.

Understanding that there are differences in users' persona, ways to optimize the ads on search and content network will be different. Let's breakdown the key differences in optimization strategies for each of these network.

CONTENT NETWORK
Click-through rate (CTR)
CTR on content network will not influence your quality score. CTR is not a great indicator for measuring the success of content network, since CTR can vary widely on the content network.

Conversion Rate (CR)
CR on content network is also not a great KPI to gauge the success, since content doesn't produce as much conversion as search network does. It is recommended to gauge "Cost per Conversion". Google has a smart pricing feature that automatically adjusts the cost of a content network click based on its effectiveness, which is done different from search network.

Just because I mention that these metrics are a great KPIs, it is still good know by how much your content network is performing differently from search network. So please don't be discouraged to monitor those metrics. Content network is great for gaining exposures for your ads, so let me point out the optimization points.

Points of Optimization
Here are some great recommendations from Google.

1. Campaign Structure: Create themed ad groups - an ad group for each product or service that you're advertising.

2. Keywords: Choose keywords that relate closely to one another and to the ads in the ad group.

3. Ads: Write clear, compelling ad text to attract users browsing content pages.

4. Content Bids: Set a separate maximum CPC for clicks that occur on the content network.

5. Position: Monitor your ad position. You can achieve maximum exposure by improving your Quality Score and selecting a competitive maximum CPC.

6. Negative Keywords: Limit how often your ads appear on content pages with irrelevant themes.

7. Site and Category Exclusion: Prevent your ads from appearing on specific sites in the content network.

I would also pay attention to seasonal trends where you could possibly rotate budgets for content network. I've seen campaigns on content network perform extremely well, when certain news breakout during an event, and content on that specific news emerged sporadically.

SEARCH NETWORK

Points of Optimization
1. Identify your advertising goals: Your optimization strategy will depend on what your goals for search engine marketing (SEM). Is it to "gain site exposure", "increase sales", "gain site registrations", etc. Depending on what the objective is, your optimization KPI could be clicks, conversions, ROI, CTR, etc.

2. Organize your account (campaign/ad group) for maximum effectiveness: You want to be very specific with each ad group containing one set of keywords and placements. Your campaign should be defined by clear topics, locations, campaign duration, language, etc. Awesome diagram that shows how an adwords account should be structured: How is an AdWords account structured?

3. Choose relevant keywords and placements: It is very important to choose specific and relevant keywords to your ad and its landing page. This relevancy will give your ads a better chance to show up.

4. Create straightforward, targeted ads: Great call-to-action, simply and straightforward, and well targeted ads would definitely perform well. Make sure to test different ads to optimize its performance.

5. Optimize your website for conversions: Ultimately, your website determines how well your ads convert. Take into consideration of using website optimization tools to perform A/B or multivariate testing on the landing page.

6. Track your account performance and results: Set Goal -> Track -> Measure -> Analyze -> Optimize; this is a key process that defines analytics (www.zoommetrix.com). Without tracking, you can't analyze and optimize. You are spending money to market your business, you must measure the return on your investments.

7. Test and modify your campaigns to get the results you want: Fine tune your keywords by monitoring your KPIs (based on campaign objective). Optimizations should not be one time fix, it should be an ongoing process.

Useful link

New ways to look at search and content network statistics

For example, Google's "Insights for Search" allow us to gauge interest in pertinent search terms. This is really interesting, since we are now capable to see search trends and compare against other terms. It can help us determine trends in seasonality, brands vs. brands, choosing ad messages, and opportunities by geo location.

In this post, I'll use an example from major shoe companies and see what this "Insights for Search" tool can do for us. Note that this tool may change and be deleted by Google anytime. So this example and material could be outdated in upcoming months.

In my example, I chose the keywords Nike, Adidas, Puma, and Reebok. These are pretty popular shoe brands out here in USA. After entering these keywords, and selected 2008, the following appears.

Note that the index valued circled in red, is "normalized" values. That means, it allows the underlying characteristics of the data sets to be compared. Obviously, Nike is very popular, and it could mean that Nike has better brand awareness than other shoe brands. However, the term Puma could associate to the animal Puma and some other product names.
Let's narrow the category to Shopping > Apparel > Footwear, and set the country to USA. Very interesting! Now Adidas and Puma has the same interest level of 25.

This is very interesting because the spike in August for Puma, tells me that they must have done something around Beijing Olympics to capture higher awareness and interest amongst the people in USA. My personal hypothesis is, Usain Bolt (Jamaica's sprinter) was wearing Puma shoes, which caused a viral effect on consumers to search online. Well, that's for you to research and confirm, and hopefully you can prove me right.

I really like the "Growth relative to category" tab next to "Interest level" tab. It shows you how each terms or brands are doing relevant to its category. I stretched the timeline to 2004 to present, and noticed something crazy going on with Reebok in 2005. What happened there, and why is it trending downwards after that.

Although Adidas seems pretty stable within its category, I've noticed the growth level was high in Germany. Check it out (below)! Also it is interesting to see it peeking at 2006 summer. If you follow soccer, you'll immediately know that Germany hosted the World Cup in June 2006. I also find this chart interesting, because Nike is growing, and has the highest growth rate in 2008. Good job Nike.

I can go on and on breaking it down by regions, and search terms including rising terms. However, I'll stop here, I hope you get the point. This tool is pretty powerful to trend the brand awareness and interest. I hope this will help you get a better understanding of search and how it can help you research the market. To those marketers for Nike, Reebok, Adidas, and Puma, I hope this helped you, too. Enjoy analyzing!!

Link to Google Insight for Search

With so much more metrics, analysts are able to dig into the data and provide deeper insights and recommendations. Apart from behavior analysis, today's interest goes beyond what visitors have done on the site, but answering the question of user satisfaction becomes even more prominent.

Traditional method to answer such question is to conduct a survey. Surveys are extremely valuable as users are willing to share their opinions about your site, service, products, etc.
Surveys could be highly intrusive, and you definitely don't want to bother your site visitors with short attention span.

Reading Avinash's blog, I've learned that he has collaborated with iPerception, and introduced 4Q which is a free survey solution that provides a simple scorecard on how happy your site visitors are. It is based on four key questions that are critical in surveying the satisfaction of your users.

1. How satisfied are my visitors?
2. What are my visitors at my website to do? In other words, what is the purpose of your visit to the site.
3. Are they completing what they set out to do?
4. If not, why not? If yes, what did they like best about the visit to the site?

What I like about this survey is that it is customizable. You can change the logo, selections of questions, adjust survey invitation rate, etc.

When visit session ends on the site and you get some kind of survey request, feel free to enter it (Yes!, on Zoommetrix.com!). It is coming up because I'm trying it out. If I get any insights, I'll definitely revisit this post and notify my findings. (I'll also give my feedback to Avinash as well)

Related Links:
How to Measure Customer Satisfaction with Web Analytics

4Q by Avinash Kaushik + iPerception

Here is an example screen shot of what it can tell you when you take your visitor type and slice it into several metrics.

I like this because in this example, it shows me that this site's returning visitors are highly engaged in terms of page views per visit, avg. time on site, and bounce rate. Assuming this is a blog site, it totally makes sense because returning visitors are probably your core users/readers.

Within this specific time frame that the data is pulled, the new visitors may have not converted to returning visitors yet. So additional metrics you would want to look at is the "recency" metrics, to see how long it took for new visitor to become a returning visitor.

When you have high percentage of new visitors and recency of 0 day, that means your site is not doing well in acquiring returning visitors. In that case, there are various communication methods you may consider to acquire returning traffic. Such as, newsletters, SEM, Direct Mailing, etc.

To summarize what needs to be done to achieve this in Google Analaytics:

1. Use javascript to validate the form when users click submit.


2. In validation, call the "pageTracker._trackPageview" if the values do not exist. For example, "pageTracker._trackPageview('/contact_us.htm/empty/'+field_name)" will show "/contact_us.htm/empty/phone" when the phone number field is empty during submission.


3. Set a specific profile for the form using Custom Filer (Filter Type: Include, Filter Field: Request URI, Filter Patter:contact form page, Case Sensitive: No) so the field name are filtered out of thousands of page views in main profile.


4. Go to the new Contact Us Profile -> Content -> Top Content to assess the form input.

In addition to this brilliant implementation, I would suggest using Google Website Optimizer to test different forms for better user experience and form completion rate.

Another thing I would think about is, if you're throwing some kind of validation message or redirecting the users to an error page, then track the % of users completing the form after landing to "reminder of miss entry" page.

Since there will always be users miss entering the information, regardless of how well you arrange the forms, it is always nice to go beyond that to see if your users are interested enough in completing the form even after their form was rejected. In that case, you should also be testing and optimizing the page when users miss enter the form.

Related Articles:
Landing Page Optimization 101 - LPO
Site Optimization - Using Google Analytics and Website Optimizer Together
Optimizing User Experience Using Web Analytics - Part 2
Optimizing User Experience Using Web Analytics - Part2

Related Link:
The Official Google Website Optimizer Blog: Thought Leaders

Wider Funnel: Three Tips for Creating Action Pages

VKI Studios: Google Website Optimizer - 5 Big Mistakes most first time users make

It is suppose to help publisher spend less time with ad management so that they can focus more on building contents for their web site or working with their advertisers.

Here is the official announcement from Google: Inside AdSense: Ad serving for everyone

Original announcement in early 2008: Official Google Blog: Our solutions for ad serving

Apparently, this Ad Manager is a complement to the DoubleClick Revenue Center, which focuses more on smaller sales/publishers.

What I find very interesting is that Ad Manager integrates well with Ad Sense (contextual ad serve). Additionally, publisher is able to create ad slots, define placements, define custom attributes for better targeting, and manage orders/inventories.

According to Google's blog, it says, "Ad Manager can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure both directly-sold and network-based inventory. It offers an intuitive and simple user interface, Google serving speed and reliability, and significant cost savings. Best of all, Ad Manager can be optionally integrated with Google AdSense to offer you an automated way to maximize the revenue of your unsold and network-managed inventory."

Going forward, it'll be interesting to see small and mid size web sites having the power to serve relevant ads and utilize their site properties as ad inventories.

In my experience with Ad Serving platforms, there are a lot of challenges working around uploading flash or rich media ads on to the site. So it'll be interesting to see how publishers, advertisers, and agencies work around the challenges with Google.

Meanwhile, if you have a small site like mine or starting to use Ad Manager, the inventory checker may result in low impressions. To get a better understanding on how you should slice up the placement, you can use your web analytics software to understand which sections/pages on your site get a lot of page views, so you can determine what to define as placements within Ad Manager.

I'd like to revisit the concept of user experience before I state some other methods in optimizing user experience using web analytics. As a person/business with a site or publishing content, you need to ask yourself, what are the experience that you want your user to experience when they visit your site.

I think user experience is an important aspect prior to users converting on the web site. If usability and user experience are bad, then the users will not be happy with your site, and will eventually leave unhappy.

In part 1, I've talked about arranging links which could speak towards accessibility of useful links. Optimizing the links using web analytics could scale across navigation menu, links in drop down list, etc. Another user experience optimization point that is significant in optimizing using web analytics is the accessibility of the key pages or site sections.

For certain non-transactional sites, you would want your "Contact Us" page to be the key page in your site or business. For blogs, it'll be your content, perhaps your new articles.

Accessibility of your key pages could be assessed using web analytics. Following are the metrics to look at for assessing the accessibility to your key pages.

• % of visitors to your key pages
• Popular path to your key pages
• Popular entry point to your site, and availability of links to your key pages on those entry pages
• Custom landing page to key pages (if investing in PPC, SEO, rich media)

% of visitors to your key pages
Obviously, you would want to know how many of your entire site traffic is attributed to the key pages. If it's 20%, then 80% of the people aren't coming to the pages you want the users to visit.

Popular path to your key pages
Certain path to your key pages may have better access to it. This path analysis will show you a deeper understanding to what routes make your key pages visible. You would then be able to ask yourself, what can you do to improve access to your key pages on the unpopular route. That will be a great optimization point for you to tackle.

Popular entry point to your site, and availability of links to your key pages on those entry pages
You might want to look at the popular entry pages on your site, and assess to see if those landing pages have great accessibility to your key pages. If not, then that'll be a great optimization point to tackle. Additional criteria to look here, is where the visitors are coming from, and that could answer why those entry pages are popular as well.

Custom landing page to key pages (if investing in PPC, and banner media)
A lot of site invests in paid per clicks (PPC), and banner ads. Typically those media campaigns would drive traffic to a specific landing page, and as a best practice that would be relevant to the ads. For example, product media campaign would drive traffic directly to product section on the site.

If you're paying money to drive traffic to your site, make sure that those landing pages have access to those key pages, to achieve your web site goal and objective.

Obviously, Google AdWords is a paid per click (PPC) management tool, where you can set your keywords, creatives, links, ad groups, etc. Although the concept of PPC is pretty simple, when you consider all the factors around costs, creatives, setting up different ad groups/campaigns, and setting up links to different landing pages, it could get pretty confusing for people who are new to this.

I highly recommend going through these learning materials which are offered through multimedia or text. It is totally free, and it only requires your time.

Don't forget to take those quizzes as it will help you to grasp the concept even better.

Google AdWords Lessons Catalog

Other related links to this article
A Learning Center for everyone

AdWords 101: the building blocks of AdWords

Some people would think having a lot of internal search performed indicates that your users are engaged with your site. To me, that will depend on what they are looking for and what their intentions are.

If people are searching your site internally, following are possible example of intentions to why they would be searching:

• The site is hard to navigate


• Users are anticipating for special offers or coupons that may reside somewhere in the site


• Users want to make sure they are not missing out on content similar to the content they already read


• Users remember the content, but forgot how to navigate to that page

When analyzing the internal site search, you may want to start laying out following metrics.

1. % of visitors using internal site search


2. Popular keywords and terms


3. % of key terms used in search


4. % distribution of search result page yielding results and without results


5. % exit after internal search performed

% of visitors using internal site search
Obviously, the first thing you want to know is how many people are using the internal site search. If your site is not a search engine (like Google), and more than 50% of the users are using internal site search, then that could be an issue. Why would half of your traffic searching your site internally??

Also, tracking this metrics across time can tell you the trend in internal site search usage as well.

Popular keywords and terms
Analytics software including SiteCatalyst, Google Analytics, HitBox (also Google Mini) should be able to show you what terms or keywords users are entering. Based on these internally searched keywords, you'll be able to gain additional insight to what people are searching within your site.

Is it special offers? coupons? specific content?

% of key terms used in search
Once you check out the keywords people searched, you'll notice there will be a lot of terms that are similar. For example, "coupon", "coupons", "coupon for xyz", "xyz coupon", "xyz coupons", etc.

Looking at the list of terms, it'll be wise to query the word "coupon" and see what % of the overall searched terms consist of that word "coupon". If a specific term made up a huge portion of your internal site search, then that's one additional insight to just looking at a huge list of similar keywords.

% distribution of search result page yielding results and without results
There will be times when users will query a term that may be out of context from what the site provide. In that case, your search result page will have 0 result, and when that happens, users tend to leave/exit the site.

There could be few reasons why a result didn't showed up, and one of it may be due to issue with the internal search engine logic. Whatever reason it it, it is wise to set a page that would track as no result page, so that you'll be able to understand the % distribution of search results (no results vs. showed results). This should tell you if your site or search mechanism is doing a great job in providing a result to the users.

% exit after internal search performed
Are your users satisfied with the results? Looking at the % exit after internal search performed will tell you if user click-through or not, even after they invested their time to search. If this exit rate is high, then there is either a problem with your search mechanism in providing relevant result, or your site does not have the content that users are expecting to see.

Possible optimization methods for internal site search

• Provide content that matches what users are searching. Especially if your site doesn't have that content.


• To avoid users exiting when there are no search results, add recommended content to increase stickiness.


• Improve your search mechanism/logic if there is high percentage of no results after users searched.


• If the internal site search usage is too high, think about improving your site navigation or touting the content so users don't need to search.

I am sure there are many more methods and practices that analysts are recommending, but if there are strategies that worked out well for you, feel free to share it with us.

I hope you found this article useful.

Here is an useful link if you're using Google Analytics' site search feature. Google defines its metrics in a nice way, that could add a lot of value to your analysis.

How are the metrics for internal site search calculated? - in Google Analytics

Related Link: Using Site Search Features in Creative Ways

The main approach to execute this is to simply apply a code like this:
pageTracker._setVar("test_value");

As an example, one of the sites I work on has English and Japanese sections. Each section will have a value to identify its section, defined as "/viewed/english" or "/viewed/japanese".
Once you have these segmentations in place, you'll be able to see how users are behaving differently in each section.

Visitor Type Segmentation
This is a powerful segmentation to get an actionable insight to who is behaving differently. Let's say you have a form entry that leads to a confirmation page. Assuming the form has a field with values "Engineer", "Project Manager" and "Director", and when the form is completed, one these values will be stored into user defined variable.

At certain point, you may learn that Directors are likely to complete the form and convert. This will tell you something about your visitor that you didn't know.

Landing Page Segmentation
You may have custom landing pages to serve different campaigns or promotions. Identifying the landing pages through user defined report would be a powerful method to analyze effective landing pages or even its campaign effectiveness.

(Example 1) Say you have two different direct mails with different slogan or description. You can have two different friendly URLs set in each of the direct mail. Direct mail A would have a landing page A, and landing page B for direct mail B. When traffic and performance for landing page B performed better than landing page A, that could mean that the direct mail B's strategy was more effective than version A.

(Example 2) You can have one campaign with a landing page, but a page can receive traffic from other various sources. Setting two different landing pages and segmenting it through user defined variables can show you which landing page is more effective while testing various traffic sources.

A/B Test
Above examples can speak as an example for A/B test. Another example to perform A/B test is testing different call to actions (CTA). Say you have two links; one with an image link and other as a simple text link.

You may distinguish these different CTAs (or possibly link type, position, etc.), and store it into user defined report to assess which criteria performed better.

Referrer Segmentation
Google analytics has a sophisticated campaign tracking method. However, you can choose to use user defined report to parse certain attribute within URLs and apply it to the report. One possible example of such application would be an existing links with identifier in the URL (not compliant to Google's campaign tracking), where the links are located in two different sites.

Site abc.com with a link "yoursite.com?source=123"
Site xyz.com with a link "yoursite.com?source=456"

Your landing page could parse these source codes and allocate proper value to a segment. Therefore you should be able to assess the referrers' performance and its effectiveness.

Useful links:
How can I classify my visitors according to what pages they visit on my site or what their responses on a form are?

How you start is as important as you finish.

Going forward, Google will only release new features on the new "ga.js" tracker. Therefore, it is recommended to upgrade your tracking code to the new version.

What's new?

• The new Google Analytics tracker supports proper JavaScript name spacing and intuitive configuration methods.


• Some test shows that it has a faster execution while the size of ga.js is minimized.


• Makes advanced features a lot more accessible.


• Track a page on multiple Google Analytics accounts.


• The new event tracker lets you segment a set of related actions.


• E-commerce tracking is improved.

Articles associated to this topic:
Announcing new graphing tools, ga.js tracking, and six new languages
Google Analytics Tracking Code Migration Guide

Basically, free products offered from Google helps driving traffic to their search, and tie users into a broader Google ecosystem. This is a similar concept to creating micro sites for any web sites out there trying to market their site, products, or services.

The great question that comes out of this is, how valuable is that micro site or sites that refer traffic to your site? Is it the level of traffic that refers to the site for increased exposure and awareness, or is it the conversion and quality of traffic that is brought to your site?

What makes Google's model so great is that, each site connects in a form of "relevancy". Google News is relevant to Google search because people who read a news article may get more curious about certain topics or content, and they'll go off searching (likely through Google).

Same logic may work for you site, when you're trying to leverage referrals from others. So in order to maximize the value of referring traffic to your site, you need to understand if you're acquiring the right kind of users. Knowing the content you serve through your web site, are there any gaps between the interest of the users, and the relevancy between the other sites and your site?

It becomes more critical to understand this, especially if your visitors are bouncing away or even paying for that traffic acquisition (money going out). When you test your metrics through analytics, look at the key metrics (page / visits, bounce rate, conversions, etc.) by referring domains. Search engines aren't the only traffic acquisition method, and quality referrals from other sites could produce valuable outcome. It can broaden your site's ecosystem.

NOTE:
Obviously, there is really not much you can control when people are linking to you site on their own will, but assessing and optimizing the referrals could be done if it's within the reach of your control like:

- Micro sites
- adjusting content
- adding content
- buying ads on other sites

In Google Analytics, their "Traffic Sources > Keywords" report is a very useful tool in tackling such analysis. Take a look at the sample list of keywords.
* This collection of data is made up for the purpose of this topic.

Assuming that the site is called "California.com", and the site is about introducing various places and lifestyle info. Using that Google Analytics' keywords reporting, you can query several main keywords that are relevant and important to your site.

The key metrics to look at is highlighted in the red box, which are:
Keywords
Visits
Visits - % of Site Total
Page / Visit
Avg. Time on Site
Bounce Rate
Basically, we're looking at a metrics associates to collection of keywords that contain the terms, like "California", "Los Angeles", etc.

This is very powerful way of looking at it, since it gives actionable insights to:

• Important and popular terms associated to the main objective of the site.


• Engagement by keyword, which will tell you if those contents are engaging or not.


• Gauge the disconnect between your content and search engine acquisition strategies.

Let's look at Keywords vs. Traffic.
It is obvious that referring terms associated to California ranks high in terms of # of visits, which is great, considering that the site is about California. In addition, California related keywords accounted 16.8% of the site visits.

Now, using this method of looking at this data, this tells me that Sacramento and Orange County related terms are pretty weak in terms of traffic. That means, you need to either add more content relevant to those terms or simply invest in buying more keywords if you are participating in paid search.

Now looking at Engagement vs. Keywords
Some how the keywords associated to "San Francisco" and "Food" are getting relatively high traffic, but low page per visit. Additionally, average time on site is lower and bounce rate seems high. This tells me that something is wrong with the content related to these key terms. Perhaps there are some contents that aren't engaging, which are causing users to not view through the pages.

This is a good starting point to tackle a deeper analysis by digging into granular keywords containing those low engaging keywords, and looks at popular entry pages by those terms as well. It won't be surprising to find one particular page receiving high level of traffic with low engagement.

Finally, Content vs. Search Acquisition Strategies
As mentioned earlier, the objective of the site is to build awareness of different places and life styles in California. So observing that the keywords "Sacramento" and "Orange County" contributing few traffic is something to look into. It could mean that there aren't many content introducing those places, or it could mean that the existing contents aren't relevant and Google is ranking them very low.

Whatever reason it is, these metrics tells you that it is something worth looking into and take some actions.

The case study introduced here is just a beginning for deeper analysis. Obviously, it will be your job to dig into these main keywords and look at a much granular level. For example, the term California may be broken down into multiple combination with terms associated to food, like "California Pizza", "California Tacos", etc.

The caveat here is not to focus too much on keywords from pure acquisition stand point, but rather look into it from serving relevant content. When you have great relevant content and you execute the necessary SEO due diligence (pate titles, meta tags, header tag structure, anchor text, etc.), eventually your web pages will be index and properly served by search engines. This method in analyzing the keywords, allows you to balance out your content strategy with what people are finding relevant to their search.

There are few tips to think about prior to investing in Google's Adwords or paid search.

1) Know your audience
You want to be able to read the right users at the right time. Review what your site is offering (products, content, service, etc.), and understand who is buying or consuming it.

2) Identify your goals.
Stay focused on how to reach your customers, while understanding the goal to measure success. Since you are likely to measure your goal based on specific campaign categories, call to action, or creatives, structure your campaign based on necessary category. For example, product line, theme, topics, etc.

3) Choose relevant keywords
I would suggest start brainstorming by making your list of keywords starting from broad terms. You can then narrow down by being more specific on the broad terms. Once you understand what keywords work best for you, you can go ahead and increase your bid on those effective words to maximize your return.

4) Work on ads that would make users click
You have to work on the creatives that would describe the title and description of the ad. Google Adwords allows you to test different creatives and optimize the rotation by best performing ads. So coming up with ads with compelling words would be very important.

Some advice to executing effective ads are:

• Include your keywords in your title and description.


• Convey key product/service benefits.


• Get to the point quickly.


• Write copy that includes a strong call to action, such as "buy now" or "sign up today."


• Direct users to the landing page that most relates to your ad.

5) Target by regions
To even increase the chance of reaching the right audience, try targeting your ads by specific region. If you business is serving to consumers on a global scale, then write your ads in different languages. If it is local, try serving it only in local areas.

6) Measure the performance
Continue to measure the success of your ads by linking it to conversions. Make sure that keywords performance is analyzed from different angles such as spending, position, conversions, and popularity. You can easily tie the performance to conversions via Google Adwords, and Google Analytics would be a great tool to see the data by traffic behavior.

7) Test, Test, Test
You have to optimize your keywords list, creatives, and landing pages in order to maximize your return on those keywords you bid. Testing your ads and its performances is the key method to give you the next action to optimize your campaigns. Don't just let your money drain out to ineffective ads. Don't be afraid to try new or change things around. Just make sure that you test it.