Tracking Online and Offline Marketing Campaigns with Google Analytics

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Although every day is a mother’s day, here in the US we dedicate one day especially for her to show our appreciation and thankfulness.? Mother’s Day is just around the corner. As a marketer or a business owner you are getting ready, like all retailers, to kick-off your Mother’s Day campaigns. Last year’s campaign did ok. You didn’t get fired , but you didn’t get a promotion either! You are a much smarter marketer now and you want to better track your initiatives, assess what channel is performing and fix what is not performing. You are planning all sorts of marketing activities: offline: TV and newspaper ads; online: paid Search, email, banners, social media, and others.

You have your messaging, promotions, copy, creative, and landing pages all ready, and soon you will go live and you have a week to figure out this “tracking, measurement and analytics” business!

No worries! Google Analytics and this post have come to the rescue!!

In this post I will walk you through a process of how to plan and implement a comprehensive external campaign tracking.

You have Google Analytics implemented on your siteYou have a basic familiarity with URL taggingLast but not least this post also assumes that you are ready and willing to be proactive and you do care about analytics and campaign ROI

As you know, the sole purpose of tagging is to differentiate between the different ads and campaigns you are running, so it is very important to agree on the structure and the naming convention as a first step. Here is an example:

As you can see from the chart above, we are running different online and offline ads for our Mother’s Day campaign. In the next section, we are going to tag all these ad’s links with the campaign variables using the URL Builder tool provided by Google.

Email campaigns are one of the most effective ways of attracting visitors to your site especially existing clients. If we don’t tag the emails links with the right campaign tags, visits from emails will be attributed as referral or direct traffic.

How do we tag email links?

Use the URL Builder to create tagged linksEnter the following variables into the URL builder:
Use the generated link URL in your email (ex. “Visit the Store” button”)

We will follow the same tagging steps that we used for email campaign to tag our banner campaign:

Use the URL Builder to create tagged linksEnter the following variables into the URL builder:
Use the generated link URL in your banner (ex. “Shop Now” button”)

Social media today is reshaping the online marketing landscape. People are using YouTube, Facebook, Flicker, and Twitter for more than just personal updates and video/picture exchange. There is a huge amount of promotion and branding taking place in these sites and our job in this post is to measure the success of these marketing efforts.

Let’s use Twitter for our Mother’s Day campaign and make sure we tag all links to our site with the proper campaign variables.

Use the URL Builder to create tagged linksEnter the following variables into the URL builder:
Shorten the generated link URL using any URL shortening tools (I usually use bit.ly)Tweet about your promotion using the tiny URL

Thanks God that Google AdWords and Google Analytics are cousins and integrate very well together! Google AdWords has a nice feature called auto-tagging which makes it easy for us to see AdWords campaign information in our Google Analytics reports without any manually tagging.

To learn more about auto-tagging visit this help topic.

Sign in to your AdWords accountClick on My account tab and select Account preferencesUnder Tracking section, click EditCheck the Destination URL Auto-tagging checkboxClick “Save changes”

Unlike AdWords, to track Yahoo paid traffic we need to manually tag the destination URL with the campaign variables.

Tag your yahoo ad link using the following variables:
Use the tagged URL for the “Destination URL” field

Similar to what we did with Yahoo ads, but with the following variables:

Website URL: http://www.store.com/Campaign Source: bingCampaign Medium: cpcCampaign Term: {QueryString}Campaign Name: Mother’s Day 2010

When we talk about tracking campaigns, it is not enough to focus only on online campaigns. We have to include the offline campaigns in our reports for complete analysis. In this section, I will share with you one method of tracking your offline campaigns in Google Analytics in 2 simple steps:

In your offline ads, refer visitors to a page that is unique to the campaign; [www.store.com/mother]Tag all visitors to the unique page with the campaign variables [source, medium, & campaign name]

How to tag all visitors to www.store.com/mother with the campaign variables?

We will assume that all visitors to the unique landing page [www.store.com/mother] are coming from a specific offline campaign let say the USA Today newspaper. When the USA Today visitors request the promotion URL and before we fire the Google Analytics code, we will refresh the landing page using meta-refresh tag, which update the URL with the campaign UTMs. When The Google Analytics code gets executed after the page refresh, it will see the URL with the campaign UTMs attached to it and will attribute the visit as desired.

Go to the URL BuilderEnter the following variables into the URL builder:
Add the following code to the header of landing page before the Google Analytics tracking code

Now as we had all tags in place, it is time for deep dive analysis into the “Mother’s Day 2010″ campaign. I suggest that you isolate the campaigns’ visits by using advanced custom segment and look at this unique segment across reports.

Sign in to your Google Analytics accountAdvanced Segments > Create a new advanced segmentAdd the following dimensions:

Now, you are ready to conduct analysis based on the customized segment. You can look at the traffic sources report and see how many people purchased and from which medium:

From the first look at the ecommerce numbers above, we can confirm that:

The TV campaign has the highest conversion rateThe newspaper campaign was not as effective as other campaignsSocial media has the highest ROI (Return on Investment)

Click on the dropdown menu below for more marketing campaign tagging examples.

If you like this exercise and you were able to extract some valuable insights for your business, apply the same concept for the upcoming Father’s Day, which is on June 20th here in the US and do a comparison between the users’ purchasing behavior in these two very special occasions.

Share your findings and happy analyzing and drop us a comment below!

For advanced users and those interested in multi-channel attribution, you can make use of the the Multiple Custom Variables (MCV) feature in Google AnalyticsIf you are running social media and online viral marketing activities and?you are active in blogging, on Twitter and Facebook, you should include “off-site”?measurements in your overall campaign?analysis. In addition, be sure to dedicate resources to listen and participate in the social conversations around your brand, products and campaigns

Technorati Tags: campaign analytics, campaign tracking, google analytics, msn adcenter, offline tagging, pay per click, search engine marketing, social media, web analytics, yahoo search marketing

Tags: campaign analytics, campaign tracking, google analytics, msn adcenter, offline tagging, pay per click, search engine marketing, social media, web analytics, yahoo search marketing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 at 5:04 PM and is filed under web analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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Google Analytics Training @ SMX East in New York – October 7, 2010

The digital marketing space is constantly evolving and for those of us in the web analytics industry, staying up-to-date and relevant is a challenge (for some of us analytics geeks, this is the only thing that keeps us going! ) But your job doesn’t end here- you are still expected to generate more revenue, reduce costs and improve the return on investment for your marketing campaigns, all in a ‘New York minute’ .

You know analytics will do the trick, but where and how can you get the proper training? Easy. Come and learn the tools of the trade at a full day hands-on Google Analytics training.

If you’re convinced and ready to register, do so before October 3. Feel free to use this code for a $100 dollar discount: smx100gaw (case sensitive). You can register here and enter the promo code or just click on this URL. But if you’re holding out and still need a bit more convincing, check out some (uncensored ) testimonials from previous training attendees.

The training will cover some basics, but will focus on much needed, yet underutilized, best practices. We will also explore various advanced topics and leave a lot of time for Q&A. You’ll be prepared for morning’s work with specific action items to implement on your own site (or your clients’ sites).

So whether you’re a marketing manager, a technical webmaster, or a consultant, and whether you’re working for a start-up or a Fortune 500, this workshop will help you leverage Google Analytics to the fullest.

Web Analytics Strategy – approach, opportunities and limitationsHow It Works – overview, accuracy and privacy implications, integrating with other dataPractical – understanding the user interfaceAdvanced Features Overview – clever stuff you can do with Google AnalyticsAccounts & Profiles, Filters & Goals – structure your data properlyExternal Campaign Tracking – measure performance of search, email, banner campaignsReporting – dashboards & insightsAdvanced Segmentation & Custom Reports – powerful ways to find insights

“I wanted to thank you for the great work you’ve done in helping Blue Shield set up Google Analytics and taking us through the process of understanding the User Interface. We are enjoying the training sessions and the entire team feels very confident in your expertise. Thank you!”
-T. S., Online Member Acquisition, Blue Shield of California

“I think Feras did a really good job presenting to an audience that had a wide range of Google Analytics experience. Glad I stayed the extra day to attend.”
-C. S., Search Engine Marketing Expo

So why wait any more! Register today and don’t forget to use this promo code for $100 discount: smx100gaw (case sensitive) or simply use this URL.

If you have any questions about the Google Analytics training, don’t hesitate to email or call. For latest updates on the workshop and other (mainly) analytics tips, follow me on twitter. And above all stay in touch!

Technorati Tags: google analytics, smx east, training, web analytics, workshop

Tags: google analytics, smx east, training, web analytics, workshop

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 14th, 2010 at 7:16 AM and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Analytics Works in Both Politics and in the Private Sector

I’m at the Googleplex this week participating in a summit. One of the keynotes is Dan Siroker, Former Director of Analytics for the Obama Presidential Campaign and is currently co-founder of CarrotSticks, a website aiming to improve math skills in kids.

Yes the election is over and this might sound like an out of the date post, but actually the message here is that Dan went on to found a start-up with the knowledge and expertise he gained from the Obama campaign. What he accomplished and learned in the political campaign is very applicable to the private sector and hopefully we can all learn a thing or two.

Some interesting facts about Obama is he out-performed McCain in the “new media” category significantly, in terms of Facebook friends, YouTube views, and website unique visitors, as well as the very important aspect of fund raising. The money raised for Obama was $656 million versus $201 millionfor McCain (not counting the Federal funds). Out of the $656 million, a staggering $500 million was raised online.

Define success and also define quantifiable success measures.Metrics, like cost per click, email sign up rate, and revenue per email recipient. In Dan’s startup, he is now measuring: cost per click, cost per playing user (free account), revenue per paying user (paid account). So when the revenue per paying user exceeds the cost per playing user, they make money! Question assumptions.Testing is king, A/B and multivariate testing both play a key role in deciding what call to action, what creative, and other aspects work best!Divide and conquer.Segment users, for example, those that never signed up, those signed up but never donated, and those that previously donated.Don’t reinvent the wheel.Use available and free tools like Google Apps, Google Websize Optimizer, and Google Analytics.Take advanatage of circumstances.Whether it is internal to your business or something external (economy, competitiion, etc), give your visitors current and relevant content.Technorati Tags: google adwords, google analytics, google website optimizer, web analytics

Tags: google adwords, google analytics, google website optimizer, web analytics

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 11:33 AM and is filed under web analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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New Google Analytics Features: Annotations, Additional Advanced Segementation Options, API & More

For those of us who started implementing and benefiting from the recently announced Google Analytics features, more is coming your way, and the Google Analytics team is calling it the “holiday bonus”!

Today our dear friend Phil Mui, Google Analytics’ Senior Product Manager, announced at SES Chicago, new and advanced features in Google Analytics. We will have specific posts with detailed examples and case studies in the future, but for now here is a quick summary of these cool new features:

I would say, a very very long-awaited for feature. You can now quickly add your own notes within the Google Analytics user interface!!! Say you see a spike in traffic in last week’s reports and you know exactly what caused it (e.g. a recent email campaign that worked well). Now, you can add use Annotations to add a comment about this email campaign, so few weeks down the road you’ll have a reference of what happened and you won’t be searching all over your email, notes, and asking your colleagues (and maybe pulling your hair as well ) to help explained the traffic spike. Other scenarios where annotations can be very helpful:

Very successful marketing programs (or maybe unsuccessful ones )External campaign not tagged properly causing data from one source to show in another sourceIntroduction of new design/landing pagesSite related issues causing data collection problems and inaccuracies

As you can see the relevant marketing campaign and site information will be right there next to your Google Analytics reports “bringing more Intelligence to data” as Phil said in his post. Very very useful and time saving feature, give it a try and start using it! Also, you have two options in Annotations, you can have the comment private or shared with others.

Here is an example of using Annotations to comment on a spike in traffic generated by a blog post.

You can now create custom reports and use advanced segmentation to leverage the power of the new Multiple Custom Variables functionality. Slice your data and reports based on the visitor, session, or page level custom variables you have created and get the insights and actionability you that will make you a hero!

For those of us that are less technical savvy, this Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) Wizard will be our best friend . You don’t have to manually construct the GATC code for sub-domains, multiple domains, cross-domains, mobile, etc; the wizard will help you get the code in a packaged and ready to use form.

For the GA ninjas, you also have a reference on How to Structure your Google Analytics Account.

More details to come out later this week, but get ready for more capabilities in the GA API, namely support for Advanced Segmentation.

Whoa, it sometimes feel like it’s a challenge to keep us with all these new features, but it’s worth every bit of effort. Roll up your sleeves and give these features a try, and start improving your site and your marketing campaign performance.

Comments or thoughts about these new features?

Technorati Tags: google analytics, web analytics

Tags: google analytics, web analytics

This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 11:01 AM and is filed under web analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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Conversion Tools Session & Google Analytics Seminar at SMX West

I want to thank all of you who attended the Conversion Ninja Toolbox Session @ SMX West on Thursday and the Google Analytics Seminar on Friday. It was pleasure meeting you all!

Also, thanks to Tim Ash, Nicolas Ward and Patrick Bennett for their great presentations at the conversion toolbox session. Check out this post that Nicholas wrote after the session, you gotta love the picture (Nicholas, can I be the one with the two swords? ).

For those of you who attended the Friday Google Analytics Seminar, thank you again and I hope you found the material helpful and I hope you put it to use right away (on Monday as you promised!! ).

Here are some additional references:

That’s it for now! Thank you all again and hope to see you at an advanced Google Analytics training in the future!Technorati Tags: google analytics, SMX west, training, web analytics

Tags: google analytics, SMX west, training, web analytics

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 6th, 2010 at 4:12 PM and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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Answers to Google Analytics Workshop Questions

My trip to the UK was short and I didn’t get to see around, as usual , but what made up for it was the amazing 1-day training experience with 43 consultants – all thirsty to learn about Google Analytics! I hope I lived up to your expectations and gave you enough to jumpstart your journey towards Google Analytics mastery and offering more value to your clients.

We had a full day packed with presentations, discussions, Q&A’s, and case studies. Some of the attending consultants had specific questions and wanted additional references, and I thought I would share it here for all to benefit:

Here is a link to a previous post on additional Google Analytics tips.There was a question regarding on-site search in Google Analytics. How do you configure two different on-site search tools (for example, one search technology on your www.e-nor.com and another search technology on www.e-nor.com/blog)? Answer: you can configure GA to look for up to 5 query parameters and 5 category parameters.Another question. How are screen resolution reports generated? GA reads it from computer settings since the ga.js is executed locally on your computer.How to exclude a range of IP addresses in Google Analytics.Site scan is a tool to verify if the Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) is correctly installed on your site.

I hope you found the above Q&A helpful. Feel free to send us an email or leave a comment if you have any other questions.

Technorati Tags: google analytics, training, web analytics, workshop

Tags: google analytics, training, web analytics, workshop

This entry was posted on Monday, April 6th, 2009 at 12:34 PM and is filed under tips for internet consultants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Best of Google Analytics Blog Posts in 2009

It’s that time of the year to review 2009: “Top 5 Google Analytics Posts in 2009″! We want to thank our blog readers for their time, input and comments and we look forward to offering you more useful tips in 2010 and additional methods and strategies to leverage Google Analytics and take your marketing optimization efforts to the max. This post lists the top viewed Google Analytics blog posts, as well as a couple of bonus points related to measuring blogs.

Let’s get started!

Content Grouping in Google Analytics: this is our top viewed post in 2009. Marketers loved it and techies loved it too , it showed you the what and the how. This very handy method allows you to categorize pages into groups of related content and collect these pages together and treat them as a single entity (for further analysis as a group). For example, if you have an online store with women and men clothing categories, you can use this technique to group the women pages as one “content group” and the men pages as another “content group” and then, as Avinash mentioned in his comment on this post, “content grouping can really help make a complex site much easier to understand from a macro perspective”. You can also, apply the same content grouping concept to brand pages, or to a groups of landing pages.Monetize your SEO effort by Leveraging Google Analytics: this was one of my posts and it had to be marketing & analysis focused, since I am not the javascript guy . If you are running a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program, you’d want to take a few minutes and read this post, if you haven’t already. The post uses a case study and real numbers to help you answer questions on how ranking, or lack thereof, impact the bottom line, and help you get decision makers to act and get the most out of your SEO program.Tracking Press Releases in Google Analytics: again, another method to enhance your measurement system and get a better sense of how your marketing initiatives are performing. Granted Press Releases fall under the “branding/awareness” marketing category, and we don’t just measure branding/awareness by immediate visits/outcomes, it’s still nice to have performance data for each press release. Check out this method, some coding is involved, but the implementation is detailed for you.The Cost of Misinformation: a popular post addressing the mis-information (by some fee-based web analytics vendors) about Google Analytics. In additional to the advanced capabilities and enterprise-level features that Google Analytics has been introducing, this post highlighted Google’s innovative, open and global eco-system for support, training and consulting, available around the globe by some of the brightest in the industry.Problems with Bounce Rates: this post was an answer to a lot of questions we get on how to correctly read and analyze one of the most useful metrics, the bounce rate. Hint: look at your top landing pages report.

And some from 2008!
And since we are talking about top posts, here are three posts that were published in 2008 but continue to be very popular, check them out and put them to use!

And another bonus – E-Nor’s Guest Posts on the official Google Analytics Blog

In addition to the top posts on the E-Nor site, here are few posts that were well received (based on the limited qualitative data we have) on the GA blog:

A couple of notes on measuring blogs and posts

Note #1- Normalize your data

If you really want to measure the most popular post in a year, the aggregate data might not tell the entire story. A post that was published in January will have a whole lot more time to get traffic/visits/comments/feed subscriptions/retweets than a blog that is published in December. This reminds me of what Malcolm Gladwell describes in his book “Outliers – The Story of Success” and how Canadian hockey players born early in the year all have a huge advantage and how this advantage compounded over time (he showed the stats and the numbers to back up his findings). So if you truly want to compare how each post did, you might want to normalize the data, add a weighing factor to compensate for the sequence of the month in the year, or simply measure stats for each post in X weeks after it has been posted.

Additionally, and for the visually inclined, you can use a Google Analytics’ Motion Chart to “play” the graph over time and watch how each post did and compare the various metrics concurrently over the span of the year.

For example, the chart above represents a number of blog posts (from the GA Top Content report) along with few metrics. The x-axis represents pageviews; y-axis: average time on site; size of the bubble represents $index, and each color represents a specific post.

You see how the blog post represented in dark blue behaved differently than the post represented in lighter blue. For example, you see a “big bubble” on the right hand side of the graph, ~550 unique pageviews with a relatively larger $index value, both are positive outcomes compared to other posts. One can then do a bit more digging and find out what led to this positive result and repeat it!

Note #2: Blog Engagement Metrics

When it comes to blogs, you don’t just want to measure visits & pageviews (that is so 2009! ), you want to have more meaningful metrics. Who cares if you are pumping out posts like there is no tomorrow and no one is engaged. I’d look for things like feed subscriber rates, comments per post, words per comment, posts per blogger, among other things.

Here are a couple of snapshots from two bloggers that are active authors on the E-Nor blog, you’ll notice completely different patterns and user interaction.

A couple of observations

Blogger A is more active in blogging 1.2 posts per month compared with 0.6 per month for Blogger BBlogger A gets fewer comments, 0.8 per post while Blogger B gets 8.4 per postOne conclusion is that while Blogger A can write, his posts are not as engaging (ouch!) but Blogger B has a knack for getting people’s attention and input. Both bloggers can learn from this quick analysis and improve their posts in 2010 (Blogger A do something to get your audience attention, and Blogger B, charm us with more posts).

I hope you have found our 2009 posts useful! We’d love to hear from you for ideas, issues, questions and areas you like us to address in 2010. Leave us a comment below or email us directly at info @ e-nor.com

Related Posts

Technorati Tags: content grouping, google analytics, motion charts

Tags: content grouping, google analytics, motion charts

This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 4:04 PM and is filed under web analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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More Deep Dive Analysis in Google Analytics – Secondary Dimensions and Pivoting

Google just announced four new features in Google Analytics. These features are in beta and are being rolled out to all GA accounts so hopefully you’ll have access to them very soon. Two of these features are intended for deep-dive analysis and offer an incredible amount of insight right at your fingertips! If you are interested in saving time and doing better analysis, keep reading. The two new features are:

To find out more, keep reading or watch our video:

Personally I’ve found this new feature to be extremely helpful. It has helped me focus more on analysis and less on digging through reports (yay!) and it definitely decreased the steps taken to get to a particular report. Secondary Dimensions allow users to view two different dimensions within the same GA report. This makes analyzing your data more efficient and saves you time. Instead of having to run different reports and compare the data, you’re able to run the report and see the data side by side. Let me show you an example:

One of our clients observed a sudden spike in their direct traffic. We needed to ascertain where the traffic was coming from. Since the client had attended a couple of recent trade-shows, our initial assumption was that this spike in direct traffic resulted from the buzz around the shows. Stop – do not settle on this conclusion so easily! We’ve been trained to use data to validate assumptions and conclusions.

In the “All Traffic Sources” report, I selected traffic sources by medium, and then I added a secondary dimension for “Country/Territory”, and voilà, the report was created and it showed us that out of 1972 direct visits, 1037 were from Pakistan.

Wait a second, we knew that the trade-shows where in the US and not in Pakistan, and the client’s target audience is US-based as well. It turns out that this particular client has an offshore software development office in Pakistan. which explained the recent spike in traffic as the developers were making updates to the site.

Even without the Secondary Dimension feature this same information is available, but you would have to leave the current report and go to a “direct segment” and then look at a geography report to find the information that is now available using the secondary dimensions feature (with one click). As stated earlier, deep dive analysis at your fingertips!

If you are an Excel geek, and I might qualify for one , you know what pivoting is all about. But for the purpose of this post, pivoting in Google Analytics will allow you to see additional metrics in the same view.

For example, say you are looking at your top landing page report. With secondary dimensions, you can now view the visitor type (new versus returning) as well.

This above report is for a news website, “/” is the homepage, and “/Politics” is the politics page. We see that the bounce rate for the “/Politics” page is much higher for new visitors than for the Returning Visitors. Time for action! Equipped with the new findings, you can review the “/Politics” page content and/or layout and assess how to further engage the new visitors. Keep in mind that when you are doing this type of analysis, keep statistical significance in mind; don’t waste time on something that is not statistically significant such as a seldom visited page.

With pivoting, the deep dive analysis is about to go into over drive. So while I am in the same GA report, it occurred to me that the client makes frequent updates to their homepage and maybe some browser incompatibilities have been introduced along the way. With a couple of clicks, I can get the insight I am looking for.

In the Secondary Dimensions drop-down, I selected “Browser”, then I selected the “Pivot” view and I choose “Operating System”. Here you go, all the cool analytics data you want right here in one table. We are now seeing:

Home page (our landing page in this example)Viewed by browser type (IE, Firefox, Chrome, and more)Viewed by Operating System (Windows, Mac, and more)By Entrances and the respective Bounce RateWow, a lot of numbers to view, but the report is much more insightful and there is so much context!

What do I do next? Easy! Meet with the web design team, share the data, and hopefully help the team prioritize fixing browser incompatibility issues starting with Firefox on Mac, and then Safari on Windows. Obviously, if you are not happy with the 34.27% Bounce Rate of traffic on Internet Explorer, then you’d want to allocate time to improve it on this segment of traffic since Internet Explorer represents a significant percentage of the total.

So to summarize, the secondary dimensions and pivoting features in Google Analytics allow us to dig much deeper into the data, and all done on-the-fly. Give these features a try and let us know what you think.

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Improve Your Conversions: Design Meets Data Using Google Browser Size and Google Analytics

Google has recently introduced a new tool called Browser Size to help web designers “ensure that important parts of a page’s user interface are visible” by a wide audience. You basically type your URL in the tool and it’ll then load your page and show what percentage of users see what sections of the page, without having to scroll i.e. giving us a visual view of what is seen “above the fold”. The idea is if more people have to scroll to find your “calls to action” they are less likely to click and convert. For example, Google applying this method on Google Earth download page layout had an impressive 10% increase in their download rates by moving the download button up by 100 pixels.

So what does the Browser Size look like? Here is how our home page appeared in the Google Browser Size:

As you can see, 90%+ of the web population can see our “Optimize Your site” Call-to-Action, the green button (surrounded by a red box for you to see it in this above snapshot, but the home page doesn’t have this ugly red box ). Kudos to our creative director and web designer (luckily we recently distributed Nordstrom’s gift certificates for the Holidays, otherwise they both would be asking for a bonus after reading this post:)).

Now that you have a visual view of your most important page elements, it’s time to put this useful information into action. We do know that design best practices for usability and conversion teach us that your important information should be immediately visible and easily accessible to users. An example of such an element is a conversion button, such as “Buy Now” for an ecommerce website.

Let’s say you have a “Buy Now” button at the bottom of the page, where only 20% of users can see it. And say your “add to cart” rate is 5% for all the visitors that come to this page – so for 1000 visitors, that’s 50 starting the purchasing process.

If we know that according to design best practices, a visible “Buy Now” button that catches your users’ eyes will entice users to buy, thus, “above the fold” is the way to go – that is, making sure this button is visible to as many users as possible (not requiring them to scroll down) could significantly increase your “add to cart” rate. That is, if 20% of your users seeing the “add to cart” button is leading to a 5% “add to cart” rate, imagine what 90% of your users immediately seeing the button may do. Even if that causes a 5% increase in “add to cart” (the new “add to cart” rate will now be 10%), you’re looking at doubling the number of visitors that start the purchasing process and you are likely to double your sales/revenue.

So with the help of this tool, if your page is being designed for 1280×720 and you realize 20% of your users can see that resolution while 90% can view 800×600 – though you don’t have to change your design to be tailored to fit the smaller size, at least the important elements should take this into account.

It’s worth mentioning that some folks have other views about the benefits of the “above the fold” concept, for example we really shouldn’t be cramming too much information up “above the fold” and we should keep in mind that “less is more”. Nonetheless, the Google Browser Size is still very useful.

The data in the Google Browser Size is collected based on visitors to Google.com. What you can also do is to use screen resolutions data from Google Analytics on your own site . Here is how to get the data in Google Analytics:

Click on the “Visitors” tabClick on “Browser Capabilities”Then click on “Screen Resolutions”

You’ll get a report on screen resolutions that visitors to your own site use. You can then optimize your site based on this information. Here is a look at the report for our site:

So it appears that from our own screen resolutions data, most of the visitors can more or less view the entire page (a very good thing!).

Now, if you had a site that had a different screen resolution distribution, like the one below, you’d want to review the current design/layout of your pages and tailor them to the different visitors’ pattern.

And as always, don’t just look at data in aggregates, use segmentation to your advantage and zoom in on the data segment that is most important to you. Here are some examples of how to slice your data before you start your analysis and fact finding:

If your targeted audience is only in US & Canada, then run the Screen Resolutions reports on an Advanced Segment for the US & Canada audienceYou might want to also segment by buyers and non-buyers and monitor any interesting trends between these two distinct groups of visitorsIf you have different page layouts on your site, for example, your blog, your home page and category pages, you’d want to run the above analysis on each unique layout and make sure the messaging/calls-to-action are where you want your visitors to see them

One last note. If you are used to running tests, whether A/B or Multivariate, then it’s probably a no-brainer to run an experiment before you make massive (or small) changes across your site. If you haven’t tried testing yet, then this is a perfect opportunity to take the data and analysis to your manager and convince them to support you with resources to begin testing and realize site and revenue improvements! You can use the powerful and free testing tool from Google, the Google Website Optimizer (GWO), or another testing tool of your choice, to confirm (or disprove) your hypothesis before your roll out the design and layout changes.

Hope you find this post helpful. Feedback, comments and questions are most welcome!

Technorati Tags: google analytics, web analytics, web design

Tags: google analytics, web analytics, web design

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 at 12:49 PM and is filed under web design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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Google Analytics Training – One Day Seminar in Stansted, UK

I’ll be heading out to the UK next week to attend WSI’s Excellence & Innovation conference for their global internet marketing consultants. On Monday March 30, I’ll be conducting a one day workshop on Google Analytics. I am told we have 40+ registered attendees (the event is already sold out!) and I am really looking forward to this session.

We typically run a 2-day Google Analytics workshop and pace the material accordingly. So cramming everything in to one day is going to be a challenge. Don’t worry WSI consultants, I won’t cram too much – I’ll be selective . The other challenge I am going to address is the needs of a mixed audience: some beginners, some with working knowledge of GA, and others that are pretty GA savvy. I don’t have a perfect solution for this challenge, but having done a number of these online marketing and analytics workshops over the years, I think we have managed to figure out a way to run them effectively. We will ensure that at the end of the day everyone will leave with a lot of practical tips, step-by-step guides, and references on how to enhance their Google Analytics implementation, analysis, and consulting know-how.

The workshop agenda has been sent to the attendees but I am planning on a couple of extra sessions. I would appreciate your comments on what you want to see in these extra sessions. Either email me directly at (feras @ e-nor .com) or leave a comment on this post.

I am known for being a last minute guy , so me writing this post almost two weeks ahead of the event is almost unheard of! The first thing the folks in the office will say when they read this post is “are you feeling ok?”

Thanks!

PS. We also have an upcoming Google Analytics workshop in the San Francisco Bay Area, on June 17 & 18.

Technorati Tags: google analytics, seminar, training, workshop

Tags: google analytics, seminar, training, workshop

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 1:00 PM and is filed under tips for internet consultants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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