Analytics - 2/4 - SwellPath

Archive for the ‘Analytics’ Category

Summer Fun with Google’s Correlate Tool and Otter Pops

Published June 8th, 2011 Analytics, Industry, News, Paid Search, SEO No Comments

Here at SwellPath we’re interested in data, not your simple hey check it out our visitors have increased by 100 this month data, we’re talking the crazy kind of how can we optimize the marketing campaign for the new Death Star kind of data. Now when Google released their new correlation tool on May 25^th, the data nerd inside me was stoked. Imagine the crazy correlations I can illustrate could mean absolutely nothing (REMEMBER: 1^st rule of statistics: Correlation does not mean causation), or could they?

First, the basics. What does this new tool do exactly?

The Features

Search correlations in terms of time trends since 2004:

Ever wonder what correlations in total search popularity with “Otter Pops” over the years? Well, it turn out they are very correlated with other summer item terms, peaking in July and bottoming out around New Years . I know, not exactly the Grand Unified Theory kind of breakthrough, but still gets your mind going on what terms could possibly correlate for our clients search terms over time and season. I found real quickly the tool can lead you to some interesting findings about clients. For instance one client we have, Ariat seems to be in sync with the search term “black jackets”. I don’t know exactly what we’re going to do with this data, but this year’s Black Friday could be huge!

“Search correlations” in terms of US locations:

From what I can tell, it’s based on two search terms along with how many people are searching in those locations. For instance ifyou look up “tornadoes” you will see a lot of correlations to terms with tornadoes all in the Midwest where the horrible tornadoes disaster is recently happened. To be honest, I haven’t been able to figure out a good use for this yet. But evidently “Otter Pops” and “Costco jobs” are huge on the west coast. Also, there seems to be a correlation for guns and fox news in the south…yikes!

Upload your own data to compare:

This is the feature that is most intriguing to me as a data hound, but also the most confusing. I’ll admit that it’s been a bit of time since my last statistics class, so the concept of the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient took me a bit to get my head wrapped around it and have already started gathering some data together for this upcoming holiday season for our retail ecommerce clients. Hopefully, we’ll be able to show you more in detail later in the year.

The draw tool:

By far the most fun feature of this new application, it allows you to draw your own frequency lines over time and see what was popular in search traffic over Google. Ever wonder what was popular in 2005 and now is making a comeback in 2011? Now you can… in seconds, and evidently it’s … Jordan shoes and wristbands (I can see the business plans already). Now is this tool going to give us any practical data we can use? Probably not, but it definitely will provide you a fun time suck for 15 minutes or so.

I’m not sure what will come from this new tool in the future, but I do know that us data geeks are sure to find new interesting insights into the world around us. Personally, besides the retail correlations, I’m interested to see if there is some PPC keywords we can bid for that never came up in our initial research. I’m sure there are already 5 hedge funds that are incubating their new S&P crusher as we speak. So, if you have any useful ideas or thoughts on how we can use this tool in the marketing measurement industry or just want to proclaim your love for Otter Pops as well, let us know.

Representing at WebVisions 2011

Published May 11th, 2011 Analytics, Events, News No Comments

Quick note to let folks know Adam Ware will be speaking at WebVisions later this month, and we’ll have some other folks at the event. The “pod” He will be leading is all about dealing with the onslaught of data that digital marketers have been presented with in the last few years: Less is the New More. So come by if you have a chance, or say hello if you see us there.

The New Google Analytics Interface: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Published May 4th, 2011 Analytics, Industry, News 3 Comments

As most people in the Web Analytics community are aware, Google Analytics launched a new version of the interface, in beta, with some great new features. The big changes are pretty well documented already, events can now be setup as goals (Awesome!), the dashboard is super customizable, etc. As someone who stares at Google Analytics WAAAY too much on a daily basis, I thought I would write a post on some of the more subtle details of the new interface that you may not notice right away.

The Good

Formatting exported reports…….in Excel………what a time suck! Why does Google Analytics export data to Excel with messy formatting? Not only is it ugly to look at, it requires additional time to re-format the data to match what you actually see in the reports. The worst one, average time on site or time on page, required an Excel formula + formatting to get that metric to look right. With the new version, all that wasted time is over. Exported reports come out nice and clean and readable. That is huge when you are aggregating data or have a client or key stakeholder that wants the raw data for something specific and you want to just setup an auto-export. Now the data they are receiving will be nice and clean and will prompt far fewer questions back. Thank you for that precious time back Google! What happened to the PDF option though???

There are some small organizational changes that are really nice in the new version.

Another great organizational improvement is that the Top Content report, now called Pages… similar to other solutions…., has quick access to the navigation summary report for path data. For those of you doing tons of search reporting, the organic search and paid search reports are now separate reports. No more clicking Search Engines then clicking non-paid, total or paid. It’s the little things right.
On a larger scale, the accounts home page is way different. Not sure how I feel about the new version yet. One thing that I do like is that you can head right into a specific report section (visitors, traffic sources, etc.) from the accounts home page rather than being pushed into the dashboard.

The Bad and the Ugly

Now for the items I don’t like, yeah that’s right. There are some funky things going on that look like they may be problems as I attempt to navigate the waters of the new Google Analytics interface. The biggest thing that freaks me out is that when you are utilizing filters within a report, let’s say your Pages report (aka Top Content), the aggregate data at the top does not adjust based on your filter. So if I wanted to see the aggregate data on a particular group of pages from the filter I applied, where are my totals? Don’t tell me I have to export the report to see the totals/averages! That seems troublesome, especially for keyword, content and product reports.

One of the absolute best things about Google Analytics is the way you can easily segment traffic and build out your custom segments. The new version has one feature missing that was really helpful – especially when you are working with manually tagged campaigns that are not 100% “clean”. The feature missing is the dropdown bar. The new version just gives you an empty field to add in your values and requires you to use Regular Expression. A good example is if you try and build out a custom segment that includes: source matches exactly > direct, you will not match any results. That is because the source to match is actually (direct), with parentheses. The old version would spit out some options based on your filter and would even update the list as you started typing. That little feature helped me out countless times when trying to figure out why a custom segment was not working or was not capturing everything I wanted it to. Please, please add that functionality back in.

As we spend more time in the new interface I’m sure that more good and bad features will emerge. What changes have you found that you like or dislike? How about multi-channel goal attribution? I’m looking forward to taking that for a spin.

SwellPath at 2011 Summer WordCamps

Published April 14th, 2011 Analytics, Events, News 1 Comment

Summer is almost here, that means time for camping season! WordCamp season that is. Several good WordCamps in the next few months, including Seattle WordCamp this weekend (April 16th), just up the road from us. I won’t be in Seattle, but I’ll be speaking at WordCamp Orange County on May 14th, and at WordCamp Columbus on June 18th. Both talks will be focused on best practices for web analytics with WordPress sites.

If you’ve never attended a WordCamp, and you’re a WordPress user, I highly recommend making the effort to go.

Please appreciate the WC OC badge to the left – a VW bus getting barreled by a perfect wave. How great is that?

[EDIT] I’ll also be at WordCamp Raleigh in mid-May, and WordCamp Montreal in early July [EDIT]

The Converting Visitor – Uncovering the Secrets of a Successful Visit

Published April 6th, 2011 Analytics No Comments

Improving your site’s conversion rate is typically the main objective when it comes to website optimization. Sometimes finding ways to improve the conversion rate can be an overwhelming task with no clear direction on where to start. Recently, I have done a lot of work on trying to hone in on specific conversion events and finding some actionable insights that can really move the needle. The same question comes up at the beginning of each project…where to start?

A great place to start is finding out what is currently working by focusing your analysis on the visitor segment that has converted. By utilizing custom segments in Google Analytics, you can create a segment that only includes the visitors who converted on a specific conversion event and then apply that segment to various reports to work backwards all the way to the entrance point. If your conversion event is broad, such as making a purchase on a retail site, you can narrow it down by adding additional qualifiers to your custom segment. Once you have really defined your specific conversion segment, you can now apply this segment to multiple reports and paint a pretty robust picture of what a successful converting visit looks like.

*Build out the conversion segment in custom segments.

The first place to apply your custom segment is to your keyword report. This is the first sign of visitor’s intent and, most likely, the conversion segment will use more specific keywords to find your site that may even contain some qualifier terms that are specifically related to the conversion event itself. Pulling a large list of keywords from this segment is a great resource to use for your SEO and paid search strategy as well as copywriting when it comes to site content and the various call-to-action buttons and touts on the site.

*The above image shows the conversion segment applied to an Organic Keyword report in Google Analytics.

Mapping this segment to your entry pages report and content and pathing reports helps you determine what type of site content is of interest to your converting visitors. This helps determine the conversion path from the site entry point all the way through to conversion rather than simply analyzing just the conversion funnel. Often visitors will explore another area of the site that exists outside of the defined funnel and these key pages may be a good place to add a call-to-action to try and push more visitors into the conversion funnel. Often there can be some pre-conversion research that happens on your site and applying this segment to the your content reports can help shed some light on where that activity occurs on your site.

*The above image shows the conversion segment applied to a Top Content report in Google Analytics.

Depending on the type of conversion event you are measuring against, another great place to apply this custom segment is to your other conversion events on the site. In a perfect world, your visitors will complete one conversion event after another. Obviously that is not always the case but you may get at least 2 conversions out of a single visitor and finding out which conversion events pair well together can help you entice visitors to continue to navigate the site after they have converted and potentially get that second conversion out of them. This data can be used to adjust your “Thank You” page and add a link to drive visitors towards another conversion event.

Once you gain a clear picture of what a converting visitor looks like, you can then explore ways to expand your reach and target the appropriate channels to drive more visitors like this to your site. By determining exactly how this visitors enter your site and what content they are consuming after they land on your site, you can find more places to entice these visitors to enter the conversion funnel and eventually see great improvements to your conversion rates.

2011 Web Analytics Conference Season Wrap-Up

Published March 18th, 2011 Analytics, Industry, News No Comments

March is a big month for conferences in digital, with South by Southwest Interactive taking up the lion’s share of the spotlight. For web analytics, it’s the conference month. All the major vendors have their user conferences, and eMetrics takes place in San Francisco. So, I thought it’d be good to provide a quick wrap-up on what went down this year, and what’s new with the major platforms.

Webtrends

The month kicked off with Webtrends Engage in San Francisco. It was a fantastic event, with some top-notch speakers and sessions. Webtrends put the icing on the cake with the announcement of Webtrends Analytics 10. Justin Garrity, Webtrends Director of User Experience, summed it up with this quote: “We want analytics 10 to be the platform you can see all of your digital presence together in one view.”

The product features a much more “marketer-friendly” interface, and some awesome integrations with Twitter and Facebook data. Ultimately it allows marketers to monitor metrics for activity in these spaces, in conjunction with their own site metrics. One of the other new features that got me excited is integration with PostRank. A very valuable feature in my opinion. There’s a great video of Justin Garrity speaking about PostRank and other Webtrends Analytics 10 features of the product in this post on PostRank blog – definitely exciting to see what Webtrends and Justin have done to extend the platform beyond the boundaries of one’s own site.

Omniture

The second week of the month brought about the Omniture Summit. Always a big party, and maybe even more so with Adobe’s backing in the last several years. This year the Summit peaked with the announcement of new features and a new platform for Adobe Online Marketing Suite. The platform changes are a combination of more robust user interface, and supposedly a more scalable back end. The highlight of the new features is the release of Adobe SocialAnalytics. This new component of the suite promises heavily to help marketers capture the elusive social media ROI, and examine the effectiveness of social touch points in all parts of the customer life-cycle. Adobe has published a brief blog post on the features and capabilities of Adobe SocialAnalytics.

The other change that Adobe has made that should excite some agencies and others running larger traditional digital media buys, is the integration of more 3rd party partners into the suite. The new partners include demand side platforms, ad servers, and video networks. See the official press release for a complete list of the new partners for Adobe Online Marketing suite.

Google Analytics

Just yesterday, following on the heals of eMetrics, the first Google Analytics User Conference was held in San Francisco. Though not an “official” Google event, Phil Mui (Google Analytics Group Product Manager) spoke, and Google used the event to announce the release of Google Analytics v5. Changes to the platform are a mix of cosmetic and functional. The cosmetic include a more streamlined interface, and changes to how reports are organized in the sidebar. The functional include some nice changes to what and how data can be displayed in dashboards; also moving toward the more marketer-friendly side of analytics. For analysts, the best two new features are the ability to use events for goals, and to use filters in custom reports. The first means that we no longer have to spoof pageviews to track goals that involve clicks or dynamic in-page events; thus avoiding inflated pageview numbers. The second means the ability to apply a filter to a custom report, and have it “saved”. This will save time, and allow for the automated export of more detailed custom reports. Here is a great video from Justin Cutroni highlighting some of the major features and changes in Google Analytics v5.

Other Analytics News

Some other analytics related news to come out of March included the release of comScore’s new analytics platform Digital Analytix. Besides creative use of the letter X, the platform also promises the ability to leverage some of the mountains of data that comScore collects, to provide analysts with a better understanding of who their audience is, and the reach of their campaigns. Definitely a platform we are excited to test and explore.

IBM’s more recent acquisitions in the analytics space are coming together, literally, in the form of Smarter Commerce. This new “suite” promises to provide businesses with a 360 degree view of their market and customer life-cycle. From some conversations I’ve had with folks in the industry, and IBM’s information on Smarter Commerce, this is now a very powerful business intelligence platform for companies with a major presence in digital commerce.

Overall, an very big month for digital analysts and those in the measurement space. Lots of focus on social this year; not as much focus on mobile as might be expected, but it was there. Besides the moves by the bigger players, lots of news being made by some of the up-and-comers in the social analytics and digital measurement space right now, and lots of buzz around some of those companies at SXSWi. 2011 certainly will be a busy and exciting year for digital measurement. Now get out there and measure something.

Add Google Analytics Data to Zoho CRM Lead Forms

Published February 16th, 2011 Analytics 8 Comments

I thought I’d earn some karma and put some instructions up for people who are interested in integrating Google Analytics data into their Zoho CRM Web-to-Lead forms. We were doing this with Salesforce, and since switching (back) to Zoho, we’ve updated the code to work with their system. Here are the steps and a link to the code at the bottom. Big thanks to Art Wells who wrote this jQuery code, and Justin Cutroni; I directed Art to his post on integrating Google Analytics with a CRM to make this happen

First step is to create the fields that will house the Google Analytics cookie data in Zoho. Navigate to Setup > Lead Settings > Fields List and create five new fields:

Google Analytics Source
Google Analytics Medium
Google Analytics Campaign
Google Analytics Keyword
Google Analytics Content

I set these all up as text fields, in the Description section (see below for how to create their own section), with a length of 100 just to be safe. I’m going to suppose you have a good knowledge of how these fields are used in Google Analytics. If you don’t then you can read up on campaign tracking in Google Analytics, and keep in mind that the source and medium values are used for referrals, organic search, and direct traffic also. Additionally, keyword is used for organic traffic. You’ll see an example later in this post.

With those setup, this next step is optional: I moved them all into their own section on the Lead page, called Google Analtyics data. This is all done in Setup > Lead Settings > Edit Page Layout. Pretty straightforward; setup the section and move the fields down there.

Now you need to get the values that Zoho is going to associate with these in the Web-to-Lead form. I’m assuming that you have a Web-to-Lead form setup and you are using it on your website. If not, you need to get that going; use Zoho’s support tools to figure that out. Moving along: go to your Web-to-Lead form in Setup > Lead Settings > Web-to-Lead Form and add these new fields into the form. Then get the source code.

Dump that code into a text editor, and find the 5 Google Analytics fields you created. They will have an input “name” of something like LEADCF8. You see how this value is configured: lead custom field and then a numeric value. Copy those field values and put them into Evernote or something.

Next, you’re going to take the script provided below and put it into your own .js file on your site. I can’t write code anymore, so don’t post a bunch of comments about how to use this. It’s in the jQuery on our site in swellpath.js. Dig up the file if you need to figure it out in detail. The screenshot shows you where the values from your Zoho Web-to-Lead form go.

Final step. Add this to each of the Web-to-Lead forms on your site, in the <form> tag:
class=’trackmaster’

This class is what triggers the script to add the hidden Google Analytics input values.

So, what do you get with all this? Check this screen shot out:

This is from a test lead, where the term “swellpath marketing analytics portland” was used to find our site. Not much to add; I think the value in this is pretty clear for sites generating leads from these Zoho forms.

iHere is the JavaScript we are using. Enjoy using this!

Mobile Traffic By Website Type [Infographic]

Published October 20th, 2010 Analytics, Mobile No Comments

This past April, Chris pulled together some initial data on iPad visits by early adopters. He was looking at traffic numbers from the first two weeks after the iPad came out.

Now that it’s October and we’ve jumped forward a few months, I went back and looked at the data for our clients to see what kind of impact mobile devices were having. I pulled together a completely unscientific sampling of sites from various organizations that SwellPath has been engaged with. The information is segmented by site type: NonProfit, Ecommerce, Communities, and B2B players.

Overall, there’s less mobile traffic for the B2B sites. The sites represented in our B2B sample are primarily software or technology providers and apparel or sporting goods manufacturers. Interesting to note, the gap between the iPhone and the Android is least for this segment.

The ecommerce group seems to have been pulling in greater amounts of mobile traffic longer than the other types of sites. This is the only segment where the iPad has beat out the Android. Is it time to get an iPad ecommerce app in place?

The community sites are primarily sites with forums, postings, news, and the ability to login to a personal account. Mobile traffic here was low at the end of last year, but it seems to have jumped up recently.

Overall, mobile traffic still represented less than 5% of September site visits for the all the websites I looked at. How does your website’s mobile traffic compare?

See this infographic on Flickr.

Local Events: WordCamp Portland 2010 and Ignite Portland 9

Published September 21st, 2010 Analytics, Events, Industry, News No Comments

Did you know WordCamp Portland was last weekend? Hopefully you did and you were able to make it over to Webtrends and see all the great stuff that went down this year: plenty of great talks, even more great people, and the (now) annual Portland WordPress town hall with Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, himself. I had the pleasure of speaking this year, and I’ve posted up my slides if you’re interested in checking them out. The talk was on getting better analytics data from your WordPress site. Thanks to all the volunteers and sponsors for putting on such a great event and giving me a chance to present.

So, if you missed out on WordCamp and you’d like to make it up to yourself, Ignite Portland 9 is Thursday, and just might be the solution you need! We’re really excited for this one, because we’ll have our very first SwellPath representation! Erin will be talking about Brain-Computer Interfaces and the Coming Wave of Mental Telepathy. I have no idea how much we can learn on that in 5 minutes, but I don’t doubt Erin will impress us all. So come down to the Bagdad Thursday night for Ignite and see Erin and the rest of the great speakers that are lined up. Hope to see you there!

Why You Should Join the Analysis Exchange

Published September 10th, 2010 Analytics, Industry, SwellPath 1 Comment

The Analysis Exchange, an project launched by Eric Peterson in late 2009, signed up it’s 1000th member recently. That’s impressive growth for a project that provides resources to multiple groups in a relatively “automated” way. In a self-described nutshell, the Exchange “is an effort designed to provide hands-on training opportunities for aspiring web analytics professionals while providing free web data analysis to the entire nonprofit community.” This captures how it benefits the students and organizations who participate, but not quite the mentors. From the surface it may look like mentors sacrifice the most, but I found the sacrifice to be minimal, and the reward to be substantial. Better yet, the reward extends beyond projects you are participating in; I’ll elaborate on that in a bit. I’m going to give a quick rundown on the sacrifice a mentor makes for my project, the reward from my project, and the overarching benefits I’m seeing from the Exchange.

The Sacrifice for Mentors

From here on I’m not going to refer to this as a sacrifice, because the amount of work I put in was very light. I burn more time and energy on a run-of-the-mill Monday morning client firedrill than I did on the project. Not only that, but I really only needed to guide and manage the project, and not really do a lot of the dirty work. Now a lot of this is due to the awesome student I was able to work with, Ferdinand David. Ferdinand was able to get things done on time, meet expectations with the deliverable, and avoid “scope creep”. A little advice for those of you who are going to go sign up to be mentors after reading this post: pay attention to the project expectations that Eric carefully outlines in the provided documentation. The effort I put into the kick-off meeting to keep the project focused on clear, achievable goals was probably the most important part of my participation. To sum up: there is little sacrifice for mentors. You are looking at a few hours of your time, spread out to conform to your schedule over the course of a couple weeks. Don’t let time deter you from signing up.

The Reward for Mentors on Analysis Exchange Projects

The reward is all about gratification, and you get it in two ways. First and foremost, you help out a non-profit. If you’ve ever had any involvement with non-profits, you know they generally need all the help they can get. You also know that it generally feels really good to provide some of that help. Donations are great, but putting a little sweat into helping out a non-profit is gratifying and satisfying on many levels; I don’t think I need to elaborate on that any more. In addition to helping out the non-profit, you get to help an aspiring web analyst gain a better understanding of what a solid web analysis project entails. So you’re helping the individual, but you’re also helping “the cause” by helping foster another analytics advocate who will contribute to, and strengthen the analytics community. Remember: only a few hours of work results in all this.

The Reward Beyond the Project

I just touched on the benefits beyond your project a bit, with the notion of growing the analytics community one student at a time. There also is the benefit of growing the analysis exchange, by helping it develop a reputation as the go-to resource for students looking for hands-on experiences with analysis projects, and the go-to resource for non-profits looking to get more insight into the activity on their web properties.

I’m also seeing it as a “badge” for mentors who are involved; it’s a qualifier of sorts. Case in point: when we went to hire both of the web analysts here at SwellPath (Greg Holiat and Erin Richey), we considered their participation as mentors in the evaluation process. Part of that was knowing that they had passed Eric’s criteria when they signed up as mentors, and the other part knowing that they were “tapped in” to the analytics community and involved.

A Call to Action

In an effort to help grow the number of mentors on the Exchange; I’ll finalize this post with a call to action to those of you right here in Portland. I mentioned that Greg and Erin are in the Exchange. Combined with me, the 3 of us make up 50% of the mentors in Portland. Wait, isn’t Portland a mecca of sorts for web analytics? So where are all the mentors? I’ve had lunch with more than 3 local analysts in the last month who aren’t mentors – don’t worry I won’t call you out in this post, but you’re buying next time. Take some time and sign-up to be a mentor; you’ll be glad you did and you’ll be helping the industry, community, a student, a non-profit. Just as important, you’re name won’t be glaringly absent from the list of local mentors.

SwellPath

Archive for the ‘Analytics’ Category

Summer Fun with Google’s Correlate Tool and Otter Pops

Representing at WebVisions 2011

The New Google Analytics Interface: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

SwellPath at 2011 Summer WordCamps

The Converting Visitor – Uncovering the Secrets of a Successful Visit

2011 Web Analytics Conference Season Wrap-Up

Webtrends

Omniture

Google Analytics

Other Analytics News

Add Google Analytics Data to Zoho CRM Lead Forms

Mobile Traffic By Website Type [Infographic]

Local Events: WordCamp Portland 2010 and Ignite Portland 9

Why You Should Join the Analysis Exchange

The Sacrifice for Mentors

The Reward for Mentors on Analysis Exchange Projects

The Reward Beyond the Project

A Call to Action

StayConnected

RecentPosts

TwitterUpdates

BlogArchive

Find It

Connect with Us

Archive for the ‘Analytics’ Category

Webtrends

Omniture

Google Analytics

Other Analytics News

The Sacrifice for Mentors

The Reward for Mentors on Analysis Exchange Projects

The Reward Beyond the Project

A Call to Action

StayConnected

NewsletterSignup

RecentPosts

TwitterUpdates

BlogArchive

Find It

Email Updates

Connect with Us