I’ve never understood why Google Analytics shows percentages rather than actual numbers in the “Goals” report when you are looking at traffic sources. The information below is good but it’s a lot better to just see the numerical amounts.

Luckily there is an easy way to show the amounts, if you are at home using custom reports. Simply set up the report using the dimensions below and the information will be available straight away.

The screenshot below shows the final report.

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How to view actual goal numbers rather than percentages in Google Analytics

The worst page on a website is the last page that a visitor looks at before they leave and unless that’s the final page in your checkout process you need to be looking at ways to improve it.

An easy method to identify pages that are causing your visitors to leave is to order your Google Analytics content report by “% Exit” but this doesn’t really help because you get loads of pages with 2 visitors and one left straight away giving a 50% Exit Rate.

What we do is to add a filter to only include pages with more than 50 page views which results in a nice list of your worst performing pages. The next step is to identify the problems with them which we will address in another post.

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How to identify your sites worst pages

Analytics programs are never going to be 100% accurate but you might not expect them to be over-reading by 2-4 times on your unique visitor numbers.

According to research this is exactly what’s going on. Scout Analytics has developed algorithms for tracking users across different devices using dozens of unique attributes and utilize patent-pending algorithms to derive a unique signature for the device, network, even the individual user (biometric). Their systems use things like typing patterns to identify people across different computers for example, you can read more on the blog.

During the past 6 months, Scout Analytics tracked hundreds of thousands of subscribers through a combination of patent-pending tracking technologies of device and biometric signatures. Scout Analytics discovered cookies have an inherent weakness that causes them to overstate the user counts on an average of two to four times.

“Virtually all measurement techniques have some rate of error, but online marketers who have a heavy reliance on cookies need to know this method has astonishingly low accuracy,” said John Lovett, senior partner for Web Analytics Demystified. “Because of this, we expect new innovations in measurement technology in the near future that will no doubt minimize marketers’ reliance on cookies and dramatically improve measurement accuracy.”

I expect that some of the major analytics provided will be interested and worried about this. On the one hand they want their figures to be more accurate but on the other hand if they were to start using this technology all their customers unique visitor numbers would fall dramatically overnight.

Via

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Your unique visitor figures are 2-4 times too high

With the huge amounts of long tail traffic websites get these days it’s very hard to analyse where sudden traffic increases and decreases come from. If you get 100,000 visitors one month and 80,000 the next month somebody is going to need a report detailing where that traffic went.

Google Analytics offers a fairly comparison of one months data over another and is also not too bad for comparing how traffic has risen (or fallen) for your top keywords.

This data is useful but it doesn’t show us what we really want to know – the keywords with the largest gains and losses from one month to another. To do this you need to export all of your keyword referral data (use Excellent Analytics to get around the 500 row limit in Google Analytics) for the two months that you want to compare and put them in an Excel file with one sheet for each month.

Next you need to add 2 blank columns next to your current months data, one column for last months figures and one for the gain/loss. Once you have done this it’s time to use the VLOOKUP function which allows you to query your previous months data on a keyword by keyword basis.

The formula you need is something like this, where January is the name of last months data sheet and A2 to B501 is the data range.

=VLOOKUP(A2,’January’!A$2:B$501,2,FALSE)

The end result is the nice spreadsheet below which can be ordered to show traffic losses and gains as you wish.

Advanced stuff

To take this to the next level format the data as a table and run a filter on keywords to include certain product names to see if you can identify a particular keyword silo that’s causing the issues.

If you are really advanced then you can download landing page data with the keywords and run reports to see which landing pages are doing better or worse. Combine this with keyword filters to narrow down exactly which keywords and landing pages are being affected and you will get a pretty full picture of your search campaigns.

In fast moving industries you probably want to save this as a template and run the reports each month.

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Analysing traffic increases & decreases using Excel

For affiliates concerned that their hard work will be wasted by ‘leaky tracking’ of offline conversions, Jonathan Treiber’s offline tracking panel at Affiliate Summit East provided hope for a more accountable tomorrow. (I know, we’re already at Affiliate Summit West – the technology is still new and the tips Jon shared still valuable, so bite me .)

Treiber is the CEO of RevTrax, which has a point-of-sale technology that enables retailers and other businesses with brick-and-mortar technology to identify sales that came through online marketing.

In plain English, they use bar-code technology and gift card technology that tie back into affiliate tracking systems. And while he was trying to interest affiliates and merchants in his platform, Jon wasn’t pushy, and made clear the appeal of such a system in general.

While Treiber’s presentation was fluid and eloquent, what really impressed me was how deftly he handled the Q&A afterwards.

Is this a call-tracking system?

Treiber told the audience that while he had the ability to do phone-tracking, that wasn’t really what his platform focused on, and referred people interested in phone tracking to Ring Revenue, an affiliate platform servicing networks, so affiliates can get paid for calls generated. (They currently work with Shareasale, CJ and LinkTrust, for those of you interested.)

Is it possible to do without coupons?

You need a digital ID, an offline ID, and something to tie them together. Jon’s presentation featured coupons, but he made the point here that it’s not strictly necessary to have a coupon from a technology perspective. (The question is how would you get a customer to bother bringing in any tracking device that helps you out, if there’s no incentive [eg coupon] for them to do so.)

Another possibility is to have products/sales/prices that are only available online, so that you know if that’s what people ask for offline, that you had an online touchpoint.

Do you need new hardware or software?

No, RevTrax’s system piggybacks on existing systems. You can think of it as a plugin.

Is it possible to use RevTrax for local internet marketing?

No, it isn’t, because the budget involved is significant. Also, the problem for local retail, restaurant and other service providers is that there are bigger risks of mistracked redemptions. The reason being that you might have a short-term orientation to boost your own profit by shaving commissions, which is less likely when the cashier isn’t the owner or a family member of the owner.

Can you extend the system with print media buys?

Yes, but it’s less exciting because there are less analytics. (I’m not sure why that would be. Perhaps something to do with the ability to micro-target tracking to a particular person as opposed to just a general tracking code for newspaper X?)

How can affiliates promote this kind of campaign?

Ranking for local store names and places in the longtail, or for product and location combinations (eg product, Miami, FL) is a possibility. Jon referenced CompUSA’s campaign around this point, I think because someone did this kind of local marketing for the big computer retailer.

How does this compare to other forms of direct marketing?

Treiber shared a case study with us about S&K men’s suits. 46% of clients RevTrax drove to their stores were new vs 26% seen from other forms of direct marketing. In other words, there was less cannibalization.

Also, there was $12/click in incremental revenue, according to their tracking.

With regards to commissions, they’ve found that 20% of coupons printed get redeemed, so you can go from a cost/sale model to a cost/print model for tracking purposes. (Eg changing the action in the definition of the program’s “CPA.”) In this respect, RevTrax competes indirectly with Coupons.com, since Coupons.com uses a pay-per-print model, though they work mostly with grocery brands in the consumer-packaged goods area.

How long do coupons last?

It’s a 30 day minimum. The latency is often just a few days to conversion or even immediate conversion for restaurants. For S&K suits it was 1-2 weeks.

Update:

There were a few things I missed or didn’t explain well initially, so I’m copying Jonathan’s explanations (which he just got to me by email) here:

Q: What about leaks with your system (eg human error, tech failures with the barcodes etc.)?

There will always be leaks at the register with human errors the same way there are errors with landing pages and ecommerce sites “going down” for some reason. Both hurt conversion rates. We can track conversion rates across impressions, clicks, prints and redemptions. If we see the numbers dip from print to redemption, we can set flags and institute an investigation with the merchant to understand why.

Q: What do you mean by incremental revenue (the S&K case study listed above)?

The incremental sales are incremental to online sales. The retailer measures what each click delivers in online sales. We show an average of $12 additional dollars of in-store sales to what they are making online.

Gab Goldenberg wrote this article on behalf of DoneSEO.com, which offers SEO services.

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The Lost Cross-Channel Affiliate Tracking Notes

Google Analytics has been rolling out new features pretty fast recently so I thought it might be a good idea to create a wishlist of features people want.

Mine are below, add yours in the comments.

• Real time reporting
• Ability to “move” an account from one login to another (for those poor clients whose data is owned by the web design company)
• An API that isn’t limited to 10,000 rows of data – why not give us all our data?
• Make exact keywords show up without using a filter
• Show average ranking data (the same as in webmaster tools) in the organic keywords report
• Funnel analysis to show more than just the last click

Any other ideas?

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Google Analytics Wishlist

One of the most exciting developments on the web in the last two years has been the increased ability to combine two or more technologies to create something new. We see this most in the Social space, of course, but overlaying data sets could lead to a dramatically increased understanding of the world we live in.

Today – after a delay of some months – I received my Hitwise (now called Experian Hitwise) newsletter. It is one of the very very that I actually remember signing up to. The other 100 a day never seem to get to my in-box now. Hitwise always use the newsletter to focus on on me as a UK user and choose an industry to give us some insight about the market share (in terms of traffic) about that industry and today chose to focus on the UK’s online property websites.

I have often thought it would be interesting to Map the link data onto the traffic data to see if there is a correlation between the links and the traffic. If we accept that Google is less of a “search engine” and more of a “popularity contest” then being able to analyse this correlation at the drop of a hat would be worth quite a lot to someone I would have thought.

For example, taking the top five companies listed in the Hitwise data, we can map their cumulative back-links over time:

Data from MajesticSEO Free backlink history checker

It is interesting to see that with the minor difference between the fourth and fifth positions, the inbound links (by domain) puts the sites in the same order as Hitwise does when it tracks traffic:

Data from Experian - Hitwise

What IS markedly different, however, is the copmparitively large market share that Rightmove gets compared to its competion – highlighted presumably accurately in the Hitwise data, even though Findaproperty have almost as many links on the internet.

What might this tell us?

For me, intuitively, it suggests that Rightmove have developed much of their traffic from offline branding. If you have been in the UK and seen adverts or looked in Newsagent windows, you’d probably not need data to back that up, but it does suggest that there may be some maths that could be used to show the power of a brand offline, by looking at the relative difference in traffic patterns, compared to links, online.

This may not be the only insight, however. One thing I tend to look at is the quality of the inbound links – particularly at the upper end – and I can tell you that “Findaproperty.com” has – on the surface – several more links from pages which have huge numbers of inbound links themselves. However – when we look further – many of those links come from the same domain. 8 out of 10 Findaproperty’s strongest links come from the “This Is” range of sites. By contrast, all 10 out of 10 of Rightmove’s strongest back-links come from different root domains. I would wager that their back-link profile is spread with a considerably larger standard deviation of IP addresses or class c domains than Findaproperty.

Further analysis would be required, but I think that’s my point – when you start to map two or more extremely large data sets together in this way, some really powerful new insights are available. This is why we use APIs do be able to securely share data. Whether it is Microsoft’s demographic profiling onto Majestic’s link data or Google’s analytics data onto its Adwords data ( which I am assured they don’t do by the way). The effect can be incredibly powerful and large companies are now starting to collaborate with these kinds of interrelationships.

Dixon Jones.

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Are Links a Good Proxy for Traffic?

With site speed apparently set to be a factor in the 2010 Google algorithm webmasters are looking for easy ways to speed up their sites and Google wants to help.

The latest Google Analytics code loads asynchronously allowing your page to load faster – download it here.

Think of the asynchronous tracking code snippet as a script that uses a “separate lane” to handle part of the processing of your webpage. As the number of cars (or in this case, scripts on your webpage) increases, the asynchronous tracker uses this lane to reduce webpage load time. Websites that use many scripts or rely on rich media content will especially benefit from this new method, but even lightweight sites will see improvements.

The new tracking snippet offers the following benefits:

• Faster tracking code load times for your web pages due to improved browser execution
• Enhanced data collection and accuracy
• Elimination of tracking errors from dependencies when the JavaScript hasn’t fully loaded

The asynchronous tracking code is now in Beta and available to all Google Analytics users. Using the new tracking code is optional: your existing Google Analytics code will continue to work as-is. But if you want to improve your webpage load times and fine-tune the accuracy of your Analytics data, then we think you’ll love this new option.

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Make Google Analytics load faster with asynchronous tracking

Most people at small to mid-size companies don’t think too much about analytics and are happy to let Google Analytics do all their day to day reporting. We think Google Analytics is a great product but it shouldn’t be the only tool you use.

Below are some innovative web analytics tools built with SEO, conversion rate optimisation & social media in mind for you to try.

BVLD Status

BLVD is somewhat of a revolution because not only does it offer real time conversion reports for social bookmarking buttons & sales, traffic data and configurable alerts for traffic spikes via social sites such as Digg but it’s Keyword Vitals feature shows show live web traffic data side-by-side with live & average keyword rankings. What we wouldn’t give for that in Google Analytics!

Analytics 360

Analytics 360 for Wordpress is a plugin developed by email software company MailChimp to show Google Analytics traffic data and email list data within the Wordpress dashboard.

The plugin allows you to visualise your site’s traffic trends and see how blog posts and email campaigns affect overall traffic. You can also isolate traffic coming directly to your site from email campaigns with the “campaign traffic” tab and chart the growth of your mailing list over time.

Click Tale

Click Tale is great for a number of reasons. The first is the visitor movies feature which uses JavaScript to record your visitors mouse movements and form inputs and lets you replay their visits in real time.

My favourite feature though is the conversion rate analytics product which shows exactly where visitors are dropping out of your web forms and which fields are taking the longest to complete. Click Tale also recently added Crazy Egg style heat maps to show where your visitors are clicking and hovering with their mouse making it a really well rounded piece of software.

Going Up

Another analytics tool to integrate rankings into traffic reports is Going Up with a well rounded AJAX system running on PHP rather than JavaScript.

The addition of Alexa rankings and some dubious quotes about PageRank are the only things that let this system down.

Powerful graphing shows each keyword for each search engine you’ve chosen to see if your site is “going up” or “going down”? The keyword position monitor is also linked into our traffic system so you can quickly add keywords that people are using to get to your site and monitor them too. In addition, we’ve integrated Google’s keyword sandbox api to show related keywords that you may not be monitoring already.

Keyword Position plays an important role in your pagerank. Pagerank gauges the overall quality of your page and helps increase traffic. Traffic increases your sites relevance, which in turn helps your search engine rankings, which helps you reach your target audience.

Know any other interesting analytics tools? Add your links in the comments.

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5 SEO Focussed Web Analytics Tools

Google Analytics has been adding loads of new features recently and in the last few days the Intelligence feature has finally been made live.

This new feature allows you to see an overview of the major events happening on any particular day before segmenting the data to drill down further.

You can also create alerts to warn you if your search traffic for a particular keyword drops by more than a certain percentage compared to the previous day or the same day last week.

It doesn’t seem to be able to match against average daily search traffic which would be far better and without real time reporting I’m not sure how useful this is but it’s a start. You could also use the alerts feature to monitor Digg traffic spikes but again the data isn’t real time so it’s not that useful.

Creating a custom alert:

Screenshot of the main Intelligence feature:

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Playing with Google Analytics Intelligence