How using Google Analytics can improve your website performance and social campaigns

Transcription

1 How using Google Analytics can improve your website performance and social campaigns

2 How using Google Analytics can improve your website performance and social campaigns Google Analytics is undoubtedly the best free tool available to help you improve your website and social campaign performance. Every time a visitor looks at a page on your website Google Analytics records information about where they are, whether they have visited before and how they reached you. Information about each visit, such as particular pages viewed, videos seen, documents downloaded and forms completed, provides valuable evidence of the quality of the visits made (later on you will see that we call these goals ). All of this information, including the path that visitors take through the site, can be used to improve the performance of your website. And knowing whether visitors came to the site from particular search engines (like Google), online advertising (like Adwords), or your social campaigns (such as those on Twitter or LinkedIn) can be really useful when deciding which social platforms are working best for you, and for reviewing how to make them work even harder. Website performance: what are we trying to achieve? If we are going to make changes to a website to improve its performance we need to be very clear about how well it is working now, and what we want it to do. Value Exchange can provide clients with a valuable analysis of website performance based on Google Analytics, delivering a summary of the most important information, and how it has changed over time, such as:

3 Numbers of visitors and visits. Page views per visit and average visit time. Bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who leave the site after only one page view) The proportion of new visitors. The number of visits from different sources of traffic (such as search, payper-click advertising, referred from external links etc). Visitor locations (geography). Referring websites and social referrers. Technology (desktop, tablet, mobile). Landing, second and exit pages (to help with understanding the visitor journey). The information can be provided for any relevant geographical region, and time period, and can be filtered to remove any unwanted traffic (for example from socalled spam-bots ).

4 Apart from looking professional and conveying other important elements of branding, websites should have clearly defined purposes such as: To collect addresses that can be used in future campaigns (often in exchange for something like a free white paper or newsletter sign up) To deliver enquiries from completed contact or quote forms To make online sales on suitable e-commerce pages We should always set SMART objectives for each of these: Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant Time-bound For example: My website will achieve 50 downloads of my online marketing white paper, providing an address for each download, every calendar month of Usually delivering on these high-level targets will require a hierarchy of goals to be reached. For example, if we are collecting addresses we would be concerned with: The number of visitors to the website every month The number of visitors from the target geographical area The number of these visitors who do not bounce from the site The number of these visitors who view the Free Download page Finally, the number of these visitors who complete the Download form Once you have listed all of the things that you need your website to do, the next step is to set the Goals in Google Analytics that you are going to measure. Setting up goals is covered in another resource document: How to set up goals in Google Analytics.

5 The page in Google Analytics that would be used to set up a goal to measure views of a contact page looks like this: Once our goals are set up we can start to collect data to see how well the website is performing. Note: Google Analytics will not calculate goals retrospectively, so it is important to allow it to collect enough data over a reasonable period to be able to carry out a meaningful (significant) analysis. Improvement as an ongoing process Improving the performance of a website is often an ongoing process where distinct improvements are implemented incrementally, until the SMART objectives are met. The process is a self-reinforcing cycle where the actions in an improvement plan (eg to move the contact form to the landing page) generate new measurements that confirm the improvements (or otherwise). Insight gained through this process is then used to design a new plan (say to change the colour of the contact form submit button to red) and the process is repeated. Changes are retained only where measurement shows them to be beneficial. The development of the plan at every cycle then requires us to try to understand what is happening in some detail, and to formulate ideas for changes that would make the performance better.

6 Used in this way Google Analytics provides the eyes and ears that help to drive the website or campaign development forward. For example, the changes that we might make to a website to increase the number of addresses registered include: Placing a link to the registration form on the home page Placing the registration form on the home page Providing an incentive to register (such as a free download) Information about what will happen (and possibly what won t happen) if an address is provided Changes to the design of the form (larger and more prominent submit button) What information can Google Analytics tell us? The creative step in the process described above, the generation of insight about how visitor behaviour is changing as the website changes, usually requires us to review a large number of different data items. For example, we may have a primary goal for our website to get downloads, from visitors in the UK, of a new white paper. To achieve this goal a number of events (or sub-goals have to take place: A visitor from the UK has to visit the website The visitor needs to view the download page The visitor needs to complete a simple registration form And finally, the visitor needs to actually download the white paper

7 The achievement of the primary goals, and the sub-goals that lead to these will provide a great deal of this insight about how well the website is performing. Important measurements would be: The number of visits to the website The number of visitors to the site from the UK The number of views of the download page The number of successful form completions The number of downloads At each stage in this journey there will be fewer visitors than the previous step, so knowing these numbers will give us real insight as to how well the process is working and where it might work better. For example, if people are visiting the download page but not completing the registration form, then we might consider relaxing the requirement to register (since in this case the primary goal is to secure downloads, not visitor information). But Google Analytics can give you much more information that will help you to form a more complete picture. In particular we can measure: The number of visits from new visitors and returning visitors The bounce rate The number of pages viewed by the average visitor How many views there have been of every page on the website The time of day at which each page was viewed, and for how long it was viewed The total time spent on the website The number of visits coming from search (organic), referral (links on other sites), paid advertising (eg Adwords), social campaigns, or direct (eg a bookmarks or typing in the URL) Details of the website that referred the visit (such as Google, a particular social media site, or a specific online directory) Details of the first page visited (the landing page), the second page, and the last (exit) page

8 Analysing the data: The Google Analytics reporting platform Signing in to your Google Analytics account is a fairly robust way to analyse your visit data and to present the results. At first glance it is hard to deduce meaningful and useful conclusions (insight) from looking at all of your Google Analytics data. However, the true power of Google Analytics lies in our ability to filter the data, to break it down into different categories and to combine various measurements to produce results that are meaningful to us. An example of Google s reporting is shown below, where we are interested in the amount of UK engaged traffic that we receive on the site over a three-month period. Using the bounce rate as a measure of engagement, the graph below shows the number visits (Google calls them sessions ) that are from the UK, and are non-bouncing, plotted on a weekly basis over a 13 week period. In this case the drop in traffic seen, followed by the sharp recovery, is most likely because of the effect of the Christmas period and the return to work seen immediately afterwards. We are often interested in the journey that visitors take on a website as it tells us which pages are of most interest and how people progress through the site towards meeting our goals. When an analysis of all of the visits (over the 13 week period) is made to find out the second page visited (most people land on the home page) we see the following analysis that appears in Google Analytics below the graph above:

9 This table shows that by far the most dominant second page over the period was What I Do, followed by the Clients page of this website. This tells us very clearly what it is that our non-bouncing visitors are most interested in - invaluable information towards the whole process of improving the visitor journey on the site. Sometimes it can be better to export data from Google Analytics into other tools, such as the NEXT ANALYTICS Excel Add-in for Custom Web and Social Media Analytics, available at One advantage of this tool is that the Google Analytics data can be easily exported into Excel, and further manipulated there. Excel can also be used to produce great graphics for reports. Which social media channels refer the most and best traffic It is important when choosing where to invest effort into social media campaigns to know which social media channels give the most impact. The quantity of visits to our website referred by a campaign is important, but we also need to know the quality of the average visit. This is because we can estimate impact by multiplying quantity and quality: Impact = Quantity * Quality This is important because a large number of low quality visits may be useless to us, and we would most probably prefer a smaller number of higher quality visits. Let s say that we want to compare how effective our Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook and Slideshare posts are at referring the quantity and quality of traffic to our website. We can do this by looking at our goal conversions (like completed contact forms), or something simpler like bounce rate, for the different social media channels.

10 The table below shows data relating to quantity (visitors, visits) and quality (percentage of new visits, average time on the site, bounce rate). Social Network Visitors Visits Visits per New Visits Avg Time Visit Bounce Visitor (%) on Site (s) Rate (%) Twitter LinkedIn Facebook SlideShare In this case we can see that: Facebook, Twitter and Slideshare have been effective at referring new traffic But Linkedin tends to bring a much higher level of returning traffic and repeat visits In fact Linkedin brings twice as many visits per visitor as the other platforms Visits from Linkedin have a much lower bounce rate (25%) than the other social media, and the bounce rate from Slideshare is particularly high (70%)The average visit referred by Linkedin is significantly higher than those from the other social media channelsso if we can say that a low bounce rate and a higher time on site both indicate a higher level of engagement with the website, we can conclude that visitors from Linkedin display a much higher level of engagement with the website (not just the original posts that referred them). A logical conclusion for this website is that Linkedin is a great social media channel for generating engaged traffic, although Twitter and Facebook are quite good at bringing new visitors. This suggests that Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook can play an important role in the overall social media strategy, but suggests something about the nature of posts that might be used on each. One strategy might be to use Twitter and Facebook primarily for awareness, referring people to posts on Linkedin, as well as (or even instead of) to the website directly.

11 Which topics have provided the most effective posts? So Google Analytics can be used to look at the impact (quality and quantity) of traffic referred by each different post on Twitter and Linkedin: A high bounce rate often suggests that the article has such wide interest that it is bringing in traffic, but visitors are not interested in any other content on the website It is nearly always better to focus on the quality of traffic rather than quantity (although both are important). For example, it is better to have 10 visits at a 30% bounce rate (7 engaged visitors) than 40 visits with a bounce rate of 95% (2 engaged visitors) To avoid the high-bounce issue, specialist, or niche articles will usually select high-quality traffic that is likely to convert on your site. It is best not to write about topics that will interest everyone. Be clear about your target audience and write exclusively for them! Conclusion Google Analytics can provide us with a wealth of information and insight that we can use to improve the performance of our websites and social campaigns. By filtering and segmenting the data we are able to look closely at the visits that are important, and to answer specific questions about what is happening on the site. By recognising the importance of the quality of traffic, as well as the quantity, we can find out which social media channels, which topics, and even which posts are having the most impact. This insight can then guide our future social media strategy, making sure that we get the best return on the investment made in this important marketing activity. What can t Google Analytics tell us? Although Google Analytics is a very powerful tool, there are several things that it can t tell us: We can t know about the repeat visits of visitors that block or delete cookies (these will be indistinguishable in Google Analytics from new visitors) Except in some cases (usually large companies), Google Analytics can t tell us which companies have visited our website Google Analytics does not make use of the IP address of visitors to identify them (this is part of Google s strict privacy policy)there are however some tools on the market, such as Lead Forensics ( that work differently from Google Analytics and have been designed to give us some of the information and functionality that Google Analytics does not provide. It requires a monthly subscription, at a fee relatively low when compared to the value of information it reveals.

12 Lead Forensics works by identifying a visitor s IP address, and uses this information to identify the visiting company. This information can be invaluable to marketers and sales teams who need to know about who is interested in their products, and their contact information. The Lead Forensics solution gives you the anonymous visitors business name, address, phone number, industry, turnover and employee numbers, as well as the pages viewed on your website. Improve ROI from your online marketing and lead generation activity by using this information to target prospect leads more effectively, based on their behaviour on your website. Key features of the Lead Forensics tool include; Access to full business contact details of your visitors Create triggered alerts for specific visitor activity on your website Truly measure the volume of traffic to your website and the sources they came from Lead Forensics software is easily installed by adding a simple tracking code to your website. The data can be instantly accessed through the online portal, or by integrating it with your CRM platform including Salesforce, Oracle, Sage and Microsoft Dynamics. Dashboard

13 Visitor List Visitor Contact Detailsand page views

14 ValueExchange offers training and strategic consultancy to help you master your social strategy and get results that boost the bottom line