Miva Merchant Conference 2012 Breakout Session by Kimberly Hodel.

1. CONFERENCE 2012
March 7 - 10, 2012

2. Kimberly Hodel
GOOGLE ANALYTICS 101:
A PEEK BEHIND THE CURTAIN
GETTING TO KNOW THE BASICS

3. What is Google Analytics?

4. What is Web Analytics?
• Data vs. Information
• Turning meaningless data into actionable
information
• Google collects the data…
• …But it's up to you to make it useful.

5. Understanding the data

6. What does Web Analytics do?
What does it measure?
• Each page on the site and how visitors navigate
through them
• How the visitor arrived (keyword, search engine)
• When they last came/how often they come back
• Where they came from (geographically)
• If they achieved the goals you set for them

7. Web Analytics is a process
Take
Measure
Action
Learn

8. Taking Action
Action = $$$
• Why don't more organizations take action?
• Don't know what to do
(lack of web analysis understanding)
• Don’t have someone to do it
(lack of resources to execute changes)

9. • Understand what's important
(…and what’s not.)
What do
Web • Put data in context
Analysts
• Segment and analyze data
do?
• Find actionable insights

10. What is the goal of your site?
Lead generation, mailing list, information (blog), or in our case –
Ecommerce
There is • “Dollar Impact” that's
actionable not an immediate
economic conversion
value for • How do I categorize
every & determine the
action value on traffic?

11. Google Analytics Menus
GA 4
GA 5

12. What can we measure?
Audience: Who Traffic sources: How Content: What did Goals: Where
came to our site did they get here? they look at? they successful?
Did they
Where do they
Bookmark Which pages? complete the
live?
goal?
Have they Where did they If not, where
been here Link enter and did we lose
before? leave? them?
Search engine
How often do What did they
(keyword?
they come search for
Paid or
back? (inside the site)
organic?)
Did they share
Email
with any
marketing
friends?
AdWords
campaign

13. Getting Started with
Google Analytics

14. Tracking Code
So, how does it work?
• Cookie based, but may move towards
server based (time stamps) in the future
• If the visitor leaves the site, and searches
again… GA Will count it as a new visit if
they come back through a different source,
and more than 30minutes has elapsed
since their previous visit

15. User Access Types
View reports only Account administrator
• Has complete control over the
• Cannot make configuration account and all of the profiles within
changes, such as creating goals or
adding other users • There is no “audit trail” with these
accounts, so be careful. (no way to
track who did what when)
You can specify access on a profile-by-profile basis

16. Account Overview - USER
You can
assign any
email address
as a GA login
Note:
User login MAY have access
to multiple GA accounts
Login does
NOT have
to be a
Gmail
Know who
account
your Better to not
users/admins use a personal
are (maintain email, when
control over possible
your accounts)

17. Account Overview - PROFILE
Separate
“buckets” of data
within an account
Can collect
Can create
different set of
different
data, filtered a
profiles for
different way,
different
for the same
websites
website

18. Dashboard
Good snapshot, but the data is very dependent on context

19. Site Usage Metrics Definitions
Visits: Number of distinct sessions in which someone interacted with the site
• Within a 30 minute period of time
• “Number of times people enter the front door of a store”
Pageviews: Number of times pages on your site were loaded
Pages/Visit: Average number of pageviews in a single visit
• If this number is 1, it's a bounce
Bounce Rate: Percentage of single-page visits
• “I come to your site, I puke, and I leave”
• Lower is better (less visits bounced)
• Can be misleading when taken out of context
(For instance: high bounce rate on a contact information page that contains a phone number)

20. Site Usage Metrics Definitions
Time on site: length of time a visit lasted, from first pageview to last pageview
• Aggregate/not useful alone
• Great when in conjunction with engagement reports
% New visits: percentage of visits my visitors who had never been to the site
• Segmentation: new folks vs. returning
• Users have a different experience when it's their first time/when they've been to the site before
• Getting people to log in helps show truly returning visitors, because it shows the different devices the
same visitor might use
Conversion Rate: #of conversion/# of visits
• “Did they do what we wanted them to do?”
(Fill out a form, buy something, etc)
• “Convert” them from a mere visitor to a “Customer”

21. Site Usage Metrics: Good and Bad
Mostly interested in comparing different groups of
visitors or trends over time
Don’t focus on absolute numbers
Info is ALWAYS dependent on context:
What type of site you have?
What really matters is moving in the right direction
“Is it better than (last month)?”

22. Choosing the Metrics that Matter:
What metrics might help measure your success?
• Ecommerce: Conversion Rate (purchases, form sign-ups)
• Content sites: Time on site, Pages/Visit
Don’t forget the intermediate steps to success:
• Did they go past the landing page? (bounce rate)
• Did they view a key page of information? (conversion rate)

23. Putting it All Together Into a Story
“Recently I visited Coolstuff.com for the
first time (new visitor). I arrived there
by clicking on a link from another site
(traffic source). I only looked at the one
page before leaving (bounce).”

24. Traffic Sources
How Did They Get Here?

25. Why do we care how they got there?
Marketing people: are their
marketing/advertising efforts successful in
generating traffic?
SEO people: is the site getting enough
attention through search engines?
Partners/affiliates: how much traffic
are they channeling to your site?
Basically, a good idea of the
“health” of the site

26. Overview – The 3 Big Buckets
Direct: URL typed directly in to an address bar, or a bookmark
• As far as GA can discern, you didn't come from somewhere else
• Bookmark might not be direct! It depends on where/when you got your cookies
Referring: Followed a link from another site
• Social media, email, advertisement, etc
Search Engines: searched by typing a keyword and clicking on a
result
• Can be organic or CPC (paid)

27. All Traffic Sources Report

28. All Traffic Sources Report - DEFINITIONS
Medium - “How”
• The channel through which the visitor
came (referral, direct, etc)
• Good to keep broad/general
Source - “Who”
• Where the came from – what other site,
what search engine (specifics)

29. All Traffic Sources Report
Dimension: a ROW in reports = label
• Represents a variety of labels applied to the data, such
as where they came from or what page they viewed
Metric: a COLUMN in reports = measurement
• Represents a measurement made on a visit, such as
time on site or bounce rate

30. All Traffic by Medium

31. Tabs: same data, different measurements
Site
Usage
Goal
Set
Ecommerce

32. Use the different chart views available
Performance view – “Performance in a visual manner”

33. Digging in to Traffic Sources:
Using the chart over time:
Measuring trends
• Use the calendar to set date ranges
• Make sure to compare not just the same
number of days, but instead line up
weekday to weekday to get the most
accurate info
• Don't use it “Daily” - go by week/month

34. Digging in to Traffic Sources
• Shows what sites, and
• “As far as GA can tell, then goes in to
you came right to the expanded detail
site.”
• View “Individual referring
pages” to see what
pages visitors are
coming from
Direct Referral

35. Percentage View
“Quantity in a pretty chart”

36. Paid vs Organic
Paid: Organic:
sponsored non-paid
ppc (pay-per-click) “natural”
cpc (cost-per-click)

37. Filter by Keyword

38. Campaign Traffic
Tracking your marketing and advertising

39. Important Questions to Ask
How did the visitor get to
my site?
Which source brought the
most?
Which source was the most
profitable?
Which source had the
highest bounce rate?
What was the ROI on that
ad campaign?

40. Getting in to the right bucket
Be consistent!
Use the same words you
chose to follow certain
campaigns
GA will count “Seminars”
and “seminars” as
different things

41. Helpful Reminders
Don't make things more complicated/granular than you have to
Use ONLY for external marketing links! - Using this within your own site
will make a mess of your data!
Outlook links will show as direct, Gmail/Ymail/web based mail will show
as referral – tagging this information gives you usable segments
Campaigns in AdWords will automatically populate here as long as your
accounts are properly linked
Remember, these are just the basics...

42. Campaign, Source, Medium, and Content
Campaign: Source:
• Aggregate overall of marketing • Who brought them to my site?
initiative • Newsletter, New York Times, Yahoo
• Biggest “bucket” - “spring2012” or (Yes, Yahoo – manually set “where”
“seminars” the traffic source is coming from to
make sure your info goes in to the
right bucket.)
Medium Content
• How did they learn about my site? • What did they click on?
• You can track the how many people
• Radio, TV, print, email click on an ad banner vs. a button
• Determine which visual items are
getting more attention

43. So... How do we do this?
• Control the link you use so that it doesn't pollute other info!
• Example: Campaign: spring2012, Source: newsletter, medium:
email
• Link address the user sees:
www.domain.com/SpringDeals
• The real link address:
www.domain.com/SpringDeals?utm_campaign=s
pring2012&utm_source=newsletter&utm_mediu
m=email
..Gosh, that's an ugly link...

44. Google's URL Builder Tool

45. Content: What did they look at on the site?
Content creators care about what content is popular
• Helps judge the success of existing content and on how to decide
on new content to add to site
Merchandisers care about what products visitors are
exposed to
Marketers care about landing pages for campaigns
and whether they draw visitors further in to the site

46. Content Overview - “Aggregate Health Check”

47. Content Reports: Identifying Pages
• This is base URL, i.e.
URL www.domain.com/category/product.html
Title • Designated by your meta title
URL by • Content Drilldown
subdirectory

48. Top Content
All the top
pages viewed,
regardless of
where they're
located in the
site

49. Content by TITLE
Unique page titles are
important!
• If multiple pages have the
same title, GA will lump them
together in this report

50. Content Metrics
Unique
Pageviews: The
• This does not include page reloads, or the same customer viewing
number of visits the same page multiple times in one visit
during which the
page was viewed
% Exit: The • A high exit rate on your final checkout URL would be good!
• ...A high exit rate on your landing page would be bad.
portion of visits
• Actionable insight:
for which this • % Exit isn't always useful – every one leaves the site from
page was the somewhere
• …But it can be useful in regards to navigational pages designed
last page viewed to lead visitors down a certain path

51. Top Landing Pages

52. Entrance Keywords
Terms like “(not set)” more common now due to Google’s new “secure search”

53. Site Search – I spy what you spy
Best Practice:
Track Internal
Searches
Visitors tend to have a
more specific mindset Learn exactly what your
when searching on a visitors are looking for
site vs. in Google

54. Site Search Metrics Definitions:
Total Unique Searches:
The number of searches performed
• Does not count identical searches within one visit
Results Pageviews/Search:
Number of result pages viewed in the search
• “Are the visitors looking for things I don't offer?”
• “Am I reaching the right audience?”
Search Exits:
Percentage of visits that exited the site after the search
• “Am I losing the people who actually came searching for what I offer?”
• “Why did I lose the sale?”

55. Site Search Metrics Definitions:
% Search refinements:
Percentage of searches that resulted in another search
• People trust search engines so much that they're more likely to modify their search terms than the are to
go to page 2 of a search
• “What are they REALLY looking for?”
Time after Search:
Time spent on the site after a search was completed
• How long does it take them to find the content they're searching for?
Search Depth:
Number of pages viewed after a search

56. Audience: Who’s out there?

57. Demographics: It's a small, small, world...
Geographic “Location is” based
and on the visitors IP
Language
data “Language” is what
language the
physical computer is
set to

58. Behavior
New vs.
Have they ever been here before?
Returning
Frequency &
How often do they come back?
Recency
How long did they stay
Engagement
How many pages did they look at?

59. Technology and Mobile Reports
What devices, browsers, operating systems are your visitors using?

60. Social Reports

61. Conversions: Goals & Ecommerce
Goals:
• What are the measures of
Did they success for visitors on your site?
do what
• Negative goals can be used to
we’d check for and associate problems
hoped?

62. Two Types of Goals
Engagement
URL Goals:
Goals:
Metric reaches a numeric
Visitor reaches a particular threshold
page
“Non-impulse oriented”
Configure funnels if there
are a certain number of
steps that leads the visitor Pages/Visit, Time on site
to this conclusion

63. Ecommerce
• How is conversion rate determined?
• Number of conversions divided by the number of visits
• What does Ecommerce tracking do?
• Tracks transactions (products, quantities, dollar value,
shipping costs, etc)
• Tracks the success of your website by sales/revenue

64. Goal Funnels
Visualize your goal completions and identify possible abandonment issues

65. Sharing is caring
• Communicate your data
• Remember – you can configure users who can either
view OR modify reports
• “Potential Value”
• the data needs to get in to the hands of the people who
can take action on your insights.

66. Apply the knowledge!