Enpiem Internet Marketing Blog

If you carry out multiple visits to your own/clients website throughout the day this can distort your Google Analytics reporting statistics so it is a good idea to implement a custom filter that excludes your own traffic.

In order to do this, follow these steps within your Google Analytics account:

• Click on ‘Edit Profile’
• Click on ‘Add Filter’
• Name the filter something like ‘Block Internal IP’
• Select ‘Exclude All Traffic From An IP Address’ from dropdown menu
• Enter your IP address in the box ’ Regular Expression for the IP addresses’
• Click ‘save changes’

When entering your IP address, enter a backslash character BEFORE each dot character so an IP address such as 163.212.171.123 will appear as 163\.212\.171\.123. Use of the backslash character prevents dots in the IP address from being treated as wildcards. Google provide more information on this at: https://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55582&hl=en_US&utm_id=ad

If you aren’t sure what your IP address is – use the following website http://whatismyipaddress.com/ and it will locate your IP that can be modified with backslash characters and implemented in your filter.

Enpiem Internet Marketing use Google Analytics and logfile applications including AWStats as part of our Website Data Analysis service. Contact us to discuss your website data analytics requirements and how we can help you make more from your website traffic.

Whilst Google Analytics will allow you to isolate paid/unpaid traffic sources within core reports, there are a number of reports where you won’t be able to see your PPC traffic as a separate source. One important report is to be able to isolate goal conversions by hour for PPC traffic only. This will allow you to manage your bidding strategy according to the most productive hours for conversions (a function not offered in Adwords itself).

In order to be able to isolate your PPC traffic from other sources and determine information such as goal conversions for PPC, you will need to create an additional website profile in your Analytics account for your domain, and then filter out all traffic that isn’t PPC.

Creating the PPC only filter is relatively straightforward. Click on ‘Analytics Settings’ then on ‘+ Add New Profile’. Then choose the second option ‘Add a Profile for an existing domain’. Locate the name of your new profile and click on ‘Edit’ and go to the ‘Filters Applied to Profile’ section and click on ‘Add filter’ option.

Choose ‘Add new Filter for Profile’ and give your filter a name such as ‘PPC Traffic Filter’. Then select ‘Custom Filter’ from the drop-down list and make sure that the second radio button is marked (this option is called: ‘include’). The ‘Filter Field’ drop down should have ‘Campaign Medium’ option selected and in the ‘Filter Pattern’ box enter: cpc|ppc. ‘Case sensitive’ should be selected as ‘No’. Then click ‘Save changes’ and that’s it!

Before you’ve finished, don’t forget to recreate the goals you had set up in your regular Analytics profile – this will allow you to track goal conversions for just PPC as well as the regular performance metrics from Adwords and Analytics. Google Analytics will now collect the same data as before, but discount every other source apart from PPC data. When you go to ‘Goals’ and ‘Total Conversions’ you can select the ‘Graph by Hour’ option and data you see will be for PPC traffic only. You can then manage your day-scheduling and bidding strategy around these

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full Paid Search Marketing management service from keyword discovery to ongoing management, optimisation and reporting. Contact us to discuss your paid search requirements and how we can help your business succeed online.

For those without the kind of budget to gain access to Hitwise or sufficient traffic volumes to appear in Alexa, the Google Analytics benchmarking tool provides interesting insight into how you rank amongst your peers.

To access Google Analytics benchmarking data you must have opted to share your site data anonymously with Google. This is done from the ‘Edit Account settings’ page and the ‘Google Analytics Data Sharing Settings’ section. Your data is then collated with other site information in an anonymous, aggregated format. Be aware that it could take up to two weeks for the benchmarking data to appear in your Analytics account after the data sharing settings have been changed and saved.

Accessing the benchmarking information is from the ‘Visitors’ tab and the second option ‘benchmarking’ (below Overview). If the function has been configured correctly you will be presented with six small charts showing top-line site metrics with the familiar blue bar but also an additional grey line showing the ‘benchmark’ value for each metric alongside your own. The metrics shown with benchmarking values are:

• Visits
• Bounce rate
• Page views
• Average time on site
• Pages-per-visit
• Percentage new visits

Below each chart you will see the total/average metrics for the data-range selected. Below this figure you will see the corresponding benchmark metrics followed by a +/- symbol and the percentage difference between your average figure and the benchmark to show how you either exceed or fall below the industry average. You are not able to save these charts to the Dashboard view or apply them to other metrics such as search engine referrals to see how your site performs against other sites for search traffic.

So how are these comparisons of use? You can assess how your site performs against similar sites on given days. For example – do you find traffic is slow on a Wednesday? With the benchmarking report for visits you can ascertain if this is a trend shared by other sites in your market or are you an exception? You can also select a different vertical market to plot the traffic trends for that market then determine if you could promote your products or services to a section of that online community to take advantage of higher traffic on given days/weeks/months.

Benchmarking is done at an account level so it will be applied to all profiles within the account. For example, if you have an additional profile that excludes all traffic other than PPC traffic this will also have benchmarking data. Google determines the traffic volume you are receiving and puts you into an appropriate group so you can compare your data with similarly sized websites.

Enpiem Internet Marketing use Google Analytics as part of our website data analysis service. Contact us to discuss your website data analysis requirements and how we can help you make more from your website traffic.

On March 4th 2009 Google updated how Google Analytics imports AdWords data to improve security and provide greater control and convenience. If you’ve not already ‘linked’ your Adwords and Analytics accounts – you should do so to benefit from the additional information that is combined with the regular Adwords data.

Whilst Adwords will provide you with a range or reports relating to the immediate click activity such as word, advert and placement performance, click-through rates, cost-per-click etc. it doesn’t provide information about the subsequent visit to the target website (what happened next). Adwords takes up the baton and provides this information by adding additional metrics as well as combining the core Adwords metrics along with the on-site data.

Linking the two accounts is relatively easy. To do this go to the ‘my account’ tab in Google Adwords and in the ‘Account Preferences’ section, ensure that ‘Auto-Tagging’ is checked. Now click on the ‘Analytics’ tab in Google Adwords and click on ‘Analytics Settings’. Next to your account name, click on the link ‘edit account settings’ and on the following page check the box to ‘Share my Google Analytics data with other Google Products’ (in this case Google Analytics). Your account will now communicate with Google Analytics and share information to enrich Analytics reports’

To view your Adwords data in Google Analytics, click on the ‘Traffic Sources’ tab then ‘Adwords’ option. This will expand to show two further options ‘Adwords Campaigns’ and ‘Keyword Positions’. The keyword position option is very useful at evaluating the most effective advertising positions on a number of user-defined metrics and we covered this in an earlier blog entry Analysing Adwords Positions in Google Analytics.

The Adwords Campaigns tab initially shows the campaigns you have in your Adwords account. The default metrics shown are visits, pages-per-visit, average time-on-site, percentage of new visitors and bounce rate. Note the three tabs above the table containing the campaign names, the default data you are looking at is ‘site usage’. Clicking on the ‘goal conversion’ tab will show you the results for your Analytics defined conversions (not to be confused with Adwords conversions). You will be able to see which campaign drives the best performance on 1-4 goals defined in Analytics as a percentage as well as a per-goal-value if you defined goal values at set-up. Clicking on the ‘clicks tab’ shows you the familiar Adwords metrics such as impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC, revenue-per-click and margins if you have this configured in Adwords. You can also assess the hourly breakdown for Goal Conversions such as sales or lead generation (details in our earlier blog entry: Analysing Hourly Traffic and Google Adwords Conversions)

Clicking on a ‘campaign’ will drill down to the ‘ad groups’ within that campaign, showing the same default metrics and again, the goal and click data is available at an ad-group level. Clicking on an ad-group drills down to the individual keywords, again with the default metrics plus goal conversions and click data from Adwords.

As you can see, combining the data from both Google Adwords and Google Analytics provides a very powerful picture of the effectiveness of your PPC activity allowing you to not only determine the most effective words for driving quality traffic to your site, but also for determining which is the optimal position for advertising and the times too.

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full Paid Search Marketing service from keyword discovery to ongoing management, optimisation and reporting, integrating with Google Analytics. Contact us to discuss your paid search requirements and how we can help your business succeed online.

Determining the most effective times of the day for website traffic is an enormous help to website owners. From determining staffing levels for inbound customer service/sales to advertising schedules for paid search marketing, hourly data provides invaluable insight into the popularity of your site throughout the day that can help you manage your business and promotional budgets.

Today we’ll look at two popular website statistical packages and how they can help you measure hourly performance - Google Analytics and AWStats. A popular gripe with Google Analytics is that it doesn’t (by default) provide hourly figures for metrics such as page visits and bandwidth. For that information you will need a logfile analysis application, hence our interest in AWStats. We’ll look at the logfile analysis tool first then see how Google Analytics can enrich the picture painted by AWStats.

Like Google Analytics, AWStats is a free statistical analysis package, but unlike Google Analytics it analyses logfiles from your web server. AWStats is compatible with the main web servers such as Apache, WebStar, IIS and many others. Whilst it provides many useful top-line metrics such as visits, pages, hits and bandwidth by day of the month, days of the week and location by country, we are interested in the hourly data it provides. AWStats shows an hourly profile chart displaying page visits, hits and bandwidth along with a table detailing the actual numbers. Whilst it doesn’t break this down into traffic sources or keywords, it does give you a useful indication as to what the popular hours are for general traffic.

Whilst traffic by hour is all well and good, how can you determine the most effective hours for your PPC activity? Adwords only shows total conversion volumes and day-average metrics. With a scheduling tool like the one provided by Adwords, if you could determine when the ‘junk’ clicks were occurring you could more effectively deploy your advertising spend to those peak hours to maximise conversion potential.

The answer to this problem lies in your goals in Analytics. The goal conversion metric is very useful on other reports provided by Analytics such as ‘referring sites’ or ‘search engines’ but the charting options here are by ‘day’ at the most granular level. The Goal Conversion sub-menu items all provide a ‘by hour’ option on the ’graph by’ section. This includes total conversions, conversion rate, goal verification etc. By configuring your goals you can then interrogate Analytics to show the hourly performance. If you set a goal for your PPC traffic landing page, this will provide an hourly assessment of click traffic (if you filter out non-ppc traffic sources from your Analytics profile), whilst enquiry forms or purchases tagged as ‘goals’ will isolate their popular hours and you can determine the most effective hours from there.

Enpiem Internet Marketing use Google Analytics and logfile applications including AWStats as part of our website data analytics service. Contact us to discuss your website data analytics requirements and how we can help you make more from your website traffic.

Google Analytics always provided data on inbound search queries that visitors use to find your website from search engines, but by configuring your internal site search application, Analytics can also track internal searching as well as search refinements and subsequent actions and outcomes taken by the user. This gives you useful information for site development, navigation and copywriting if you users can’t find what they’re looking for with your current architecture.

If you don’t currently have site search functionality on your website then you should seriously consider getting it. Just because your visitors arrived from a given search query doesn’t mean they will be able to locate the specific information/product/service they are interested in unless they arrived on a very well targeted landing page. A non-specific organic listing to your homepage for example still relies on the individual locating the information they want. We addressed sourcing and implementing a site search application in an earlier blog entry so won’t repeat ourselves here, read the blog post adding site search to your website for that information. As proof-of-concept, rather than scan through pages-and-pages on own blog to find this article, we used our own website search box and found the appropriate blog entry.

Before we look at the features and functionality that Google Analytics offers for internal site search data, we need to look at how to configure Analytics to identify internal searching. You can find the search data in the ‘content’ section of Google Analytics, however, if you haven’t already configured your site search to communicate with Google Analytics the reporting options will appear greyed out. On your profile page (before drilling into specific reporting information) click the ‘edit’ option in the ‘actions’ column. In the first section called ‘Main Website Profile Information’ click on the small ‘edit’ link in the top right corner of the box. On this page in the third section down you will find ‘site search’. Clicking ‘do track site search’ will expand the box and require you to identify the query parameter. This designates an internal search query and your search application will provide this information which can be a word or even just a single letter. Click ‘save changes’ and you’re done. Analytics will now record internal site search queries and the greyed-out reports will be accessible.

The first report is an overview, summarising a number of top-line metrics such as number of visits with search, number of unique searches, results pages viewed following search, percentage of search refinement, time-on-site following a search and search-depth.

The next menu category after summary is Usage. This report provides a percentage split of those visitors that visited your website and carried out a site search against those that visited the site and didn’t search. From the default ‘visit’ metric you can change the parameter to time-on-site, number of pages visited, bounce rates, goal completions etc. and determine the quality difference in visits with and without internal search. If you have configured goals in analytics then you can also see goal completion and e-commerce data (we covered goal configuration in an earlier blog entry Using Goals in Google Analytics).

The Search Terms report drills down to the specific queries that your users entered and the outcome of this search such as search refinements and time-on-site after search. Again, you can change the parameters to see information such as which search engine they arrived from and then the outcome of the on-site search they made. You can also determine the landing page they carried out the search from in order to pinpoint the page where they determined they couldn’t find the content they were looking for. You can also determine if the visit was organic or from a referral source. Clicking on a given search phrase and then selecting ‘search navigation’ in the ‘analyse’ drop down shows a click-path from the page where the search began through the search results page to the outcome page. This will show how effective the search query was at delivering what the user was looking for.

The Start Pages report shows the individual pages where a search began and allows you to change metrics to assess individual factors such as time-on-site after search for each page, revenue, transactions, goal completions etc. The destination report shows the downstream equivalent allowing you to do the same assessments to see how accurate their search result was. Throughout these reports you will also see a metric called ‘refinement’ which is the subsequent search carried out following the primary on-site search. This shows how the user narrows-down their searching still hopeful of finding what they are looking for before abandoning their visit.

Lastly the Trending report shows day profile and variable metrics such as visits with search, unique searches, page-views after search, percentage of search refinements, percentage of search exits, time after search, search depth.

Whether analysing the usability of your site for future development, the effectiveness of your on-site search application or just expanding/refining your PPC keyword portfolio, site search analysis in Google Analytics is a useful tool and one worth exploring if you are already using an on-site search engine or considering implementing one.

Enpiem Internet Marketing use Google Analytics tracking as part of our website data analysis service. Contact us to discuss your website data analytics requirements and how we can help you make more from your website traffic.

In addition to the usual metrics and default charts in Google Analytics, there is an interesting feature that many users overlook when monitoring their website traffic – the ‘Visualise’ function. This is a feature that uses a motion chart with multiple user-defined metrics to identify trends in the data in an animated format.

So how can you use the Visualise feature? We have a client that runs display advertising on several websites and also contributes written article content to those sites on an ad-hoc basis. When reviewing the effectiveness of both channels for their marketing plan we needed to try and identify the effect both types of content had on driving traffic to their website. Did article content deliver users that spent more time on the site? Did advertising clicks lead to a higher sales conversion rate? And which site brought the best quality traffic? The visualise function was able to show us this information and allow us to dig deeper. Some commentators have criticised the tool as little more than a ‘cool gimmick’ with no practical use, but we disagree. It brings data to life and does what it suggests – helping the user identify trends faster.

Taking our client example, we went to the ‘traffic sources’ tab and selected the ‘referring sites’ option. This showed the standard summary chart with the ‘visualise’ option above it. Clicking on the Visualise option brings up the motion chart where you can select your chosen metrics to analyse. In our case we defined the X axis as the average time on site and the Y axis as number of visits. We chose to assign unique colours to each referring site and associate the dot size with time on site as well. Using the month of December as a period of activity we lowered the playback speed and watched the activity unfold over the month.

At any day-point in the chosen range you can pause the animation and mouse over the dots to get summary information. Clicking on a dot also places a name-tag on that dot which follows the dot around allowing for easy identification. We noted the relevant days for content publication or display advertising campaign launch and tagged the relevant referrers dots and watched as they varied day-by-day. By ticking the ‘trails’ option you can see a static line for each referrer with a date stamp so you can see how the activity varied over specific days.

We were able to quickly identify the change in visitor volume against time-on-site during these key moments for content submission or ad campaign display. In this particular case article content delivered longer time-on-site visits. However, varying the metrics to factor in goal conversions showed that one particular site proved significantly more effective at converting visitors through display advertising. Have a look at the Visualise function in your Google Analytics account and see how strategic and tactical questions can be answered by varying the metrics.

Enpiem Internet Marketing use Google Analytics tracking as part of our website data analysis service. Contact us to discuss your website data analytics requirements and how we can help you make more from your website traffic.

In addition to the tracking and analysing of website visitor data with applications such as Google Analytics, it is also important to set up a Google Webmaster Tools account (which is free) as well. The Webmaster Tools service is a two-way dialogue between you (the webmaster) and Google. You benefit from accessing Google data about the indexing of your site and how Google users find your website. Google benefits from your guiding their indexing application (Googlebot) to more effectively and efficiently interact with your site and its content. So what will you be able to do with your account?

• > Sitemap management – creating an XML sitemap for Google provides it with further information on how it should treat your site. The sitemap could include pages that aren’t linked from the homepage and therefore might not be indexed otherwise. It also allows you to specify the importance of each page and the frequency of change to each page (for example an ‘about us’ page might change on once every year but a ‘news’ or ‘frequently asked questions’ page might change weekly or even daily)
• > Search queries – this helps you identify which search queries return your website in the organic listings and which position they are in on Google. In Google Analytics this information relates to the keywords that actually brought traffic to your website rather than those words that were ranked on the results page. This tool can help you focus on specific keyword phrases that should be improved to enhance your organic position and hopefully increase click-through
• > Site diagnostics – shows useful information such as page link errors where an internal link resolves in a missing page (such as an internal link to a page that was deleted or renamed). You can also check for issues such as duplication or missing tags (such as title or description) that would affect listing with the Content Analysis function
• > What Googlebot sees – provides information on how Google’s indexing software views your website and the inbound link keywords and anchor text and page content it reads. This can help you to better optimise your inbound links as well as improve site content to enhance certain valuable terms and keyword phrases
• > Statistics – provides links to queries such as how many pages of your site have been indexed by Google (remember that not all pages on your sitemap will end up included). Crawl stats show the previous 90-days activity by Googlebot and the average number of pages and data analysed

Google Webmaster Tools is a free resource that only takes 5-minutes to set-up and requires validation of your status as webmaster by either adding a META tag to your homepage or uploading an HTML file with an alphanumeric name determined by Google. If you are able to upload either of these to your webserver you are allowed to view Webmaster data about the site.

Enpiem Internet Marketing create Google Webmaster Tools accounts as a standard part of all website development projects and also use these accounts when providing SEO services including on-page and off-page optimisation, link management and copywriting. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

When making decisions about budget allocation for digital marketing or website optimisation, Google Analytics provides valuable information using the Conversion Goals and Funnel function. If you already use Google Adwords you will probably be familiar with conversions and conversion tracking. Analytics goes beyond Adwords in letting you differentiate between sources such as PPC, natural listings and inbound referrers as well as putting a monetary value on goal completion. You can also use drop-out metrics to assess if there are any points in your customer journey that could be improved to reduce churn mid-purchase. Here we will look at the basic steps to take in order to set up goal tracking and conversion funnels in Google Analytics. 

When a visitor reaches a pre-determined page on your website then Google Analytics registers this as a ‘goal’ having been completed. A goal could be the downloading of a document (such as a PDF white paper), completion of an enquiry form or the confirmation of a completed online transaction. It is important to define goals for non e-commerce websites as the data will still help you improve efficiency and return on investment. 

Log into Analytics and on the ‘Analytics settings’ page, click on the action ‘edit’ next to the appropriate site profile and this will take you to the site profile page. Here you will find the ‘Goals & Funnel’ section. On the ‘settings’ column click ‘edit’ and complete the required field information including the URL of your goal completion page (typically a ‘thank-you’ page). At this stage you can provide a goal value such as the revenue for an enquiry form submission or downloaded document. Using your click-to-sale metrics you can determine how many clicks it takes on average to drive a goal and divide this by your per-sale revenue and apply this per-action figure as your goal value. 

If your goal is a relatively straightforward ‘A to B’ process then it won’t be necessary to define a funnel. However, if the goal requires the user to progress through a number of pages before the goal is reached, then funnel definition is very useful. The goal will already be defined as the final step, however you can defined an additional 10 steps prior to goal completion. In defining the steps you can enter the URL and a name (cart confirmation page). You will be able to see this information in the ‘funnel visualisation report’ in the goals tab on your Analytics report. Funnel reporting will help you quickly identify the stages in your customer journey that require optimising. For instance the provision of testimonials or the provision of a customer support live-chat tool could re-focus the prospective customer on completing the transaction. 

Enpiem Internet Marketing use Google Analytics tracking as part of our website data analysis service. Contact us to discuss your website data analytics requirements and how we can help you make more from your website traffic.