In our previous article, we discussed about the importance of Goal Setting. The next step after setting your goals is to track goal completion. To access the number of goal conversions, you can choose Goals section on the left navigation (Figure 1). The first step to improve goal conversion is to set up a Goal Funnel.

Figure 1: Goal Section Location

1. Goal Funnel

Goal Funnel defines all steps or pages that visitors might visit to complete the goal that you have specified. For example, the sales check out process can include the following steps:

Step 1: Select a product (Products page)

Step 2: Enter billing and shipping information (Billing and Shipping page)

Step 3: Receipt page

In this example, you might want to set the Receipt page as your URL Destination goal. You might also want to set step 1&2 as steps in your Funnel.

Figure 2: Goal Funnel Illustration

To set up a Goal Funnel, you can follow the steps below:

• Go to the Goal section (Analytics Settings ->Profile Settings -> Goal)
• Choose the goal that you want to set up Goal Funnel, click Edit button
• In the Goal Funnel section, click “Yes, create a funnel for this goal”
• Define steps of your goal conversions

2. Funnel Visualization

When you define Goal Funnel, you can access to Funnel Visualization report under Goal section of the navigation (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Funnel Visualization Report Location

By taking advantage of Funnel Visualization report, you will know how many people entered your funnel, how many people proceeded through the funnel, and how many people left your funnel and where they went after that. This data is valuable because it helps to identify where visitors quit the conversion process. By knowing which pages are the bottlenecks, you can re-design them. This is an illustration of Funnel Visualization report:

Figure 4: Funnel Visualization Report Illustration

In Figure 4, the left side of the funnel shows all pages where visitors entered the funnel. The right side of the funnel shows pages where visitors went to after they left the funnel. The middle of the funnel shows how visitors proceeded through the funnel. So we have 105,280 visitors entered the funnel but only 14% of the total visitors proceeded to view Product page, 86% of visitors either went to other pages of your site or left your site entirely. Based on this information, you might want to make some changes on the Product Categories page so that more visitors will proceed through the funnel which results more goal conversions.

In summary, Funnel Visualization report will help you to examine where visitors enter and exit your conversion process, eliminate the negatives pages in the process, and identify which paths lead to the most goal completion when you set up various paths to a goal. You can improve user experience by identifying the pages in the funnel that have a high rate of abandonment. As shown in Figure 4, 90,770 would-be customers bailed out. Let’s say the average spending of a visitor on your site is $10. It means that the site lost $907,700 due to Product Categories page. With Funnel Visualization report, you can build a more effective conversion process that provides a better user experience. Be sure to set up your goals and funnels in Google Analytics and take advantage of this data visualization tool.

You hear the name Insightbytes, it’s interesting, it’s catchy, but what does it mean? Insightbytes is a sector of Macrosoft that specializes in Analytics and produces products to the likes of MacroVStudio. All websites can benefit from programs such as Insightbytes. Insightbytes monitors all traffic coming to your website by implementing Google analytics onto your site. With the proper implementation of goals, funnels, and other key components we are able to measure activity within your website. With these metrics we are able to determine target markets and finally get some real ROI numbers to your marketing campaign. Another crucial benefit of analytics is determining the path in which traffic is attained; with this information we can determine bottlenecks and points of high bounce rates. Once evaluated this information can be used to alter web design to increase goal rates and improve overall customer satisfaction. The insight that our teams adds is not just within the knowledge of running a program but a marketing and social media expertise that leads to the ability to take action with the data we find.

There are two categories of web analytics called “On-site” and “Off-site”, which Insightbytes knows all about. The Off-site measures the opportunity your website has to be great, and the “buzz” or current comments and feedback it gets. The On-site measures the journey someone takes once going through your website and its performance commercially. We manage both of these crucial assets to produce a 360 degree look at your websites current and potential performance. Our goal here at Insightbytes is to help your business succeed; don’t waste any more time, Contact Us Now!

Setting goals for a website is like setting goals for your life. Goals are objectives you work towards. A goal for a website defines what is important to your business, just as a goal for your life defines what is meaningful to you.

Creating these metrics is the best way to manage the success of your business website. Below are two steps that will differentiate you from your competitors via the understanding of your audience and ability to market accordingly:

1. First step:  Goal Identification

The first step in properly setting up the goal function of Google Analytics is to identify your site’s targets.   Measuring a site means measuring a site’s effectiveness. Whether you are an e-commerce site, lead generation site, or publishing site, identifying your goals is the most important step in the process of setting up your Google Analytics profile.

Some examples of different goal types are:

• Completed transactions

• Adding something to a cart

• Starting to complete a form

• Form submission (lead generated)

• File downloads (PDFs / white papers)

• Links clicked (follow RSS / submit a comment or review)

• Visiting a particular page

2. Second step: Goal Setup

When you first login to your Google Analytics account you arrive at the Overview page. From this page you must identify the Profile that you would like to configure goals for (up to four per profile) and click “edit” on the far right in the “Actions” column.

This will bring you to the “Profile Settings” page; in second box down you will see a section titled “Conversion Goals and Funnel”. On the far right the “Setting” column offers the option to “edit” your goals. If there is no information in the “URL” column and you click “edit” you will be creating a new goal. The page you are now taken to contains two different sections, “Goal Information”, and “Define Funnel”.

The goal section includes six pieces of information, detailed below:

a.       Active Goal – If you are setting up your goal, the “On” radio button must be selected. You can use this to toggle a goal “On” and “Off” in the future.

b.      Match Type – From this drop down menu you must choose from “Head Match”, “Exact Match”, or “Regular Expression Match”. An Exact Match is an exact URL match. A Head Match would be used if the URL string has a session ID or parameter that is included in the URL so that each time the URL is generated it is different.

c.       Goal URL – The goal URL is the page that a visitor is taken to once they have successfully completed your goal. For the goal page “http://www.mysite.com/thankyou.html” enter “/thankyou.html”

Note: Usually you do not need to enter the entire URL. The request URL, what comes after the domain or hostname, make it more readable.

d.      Goal Name – This information will be used to identify your goal in your reports, as well as when editing information in your Google Analytics profile.

e.       Case Sensitive – This is a check box, that if selected will only goal a goal if the URLs entered above match exactly the capitalization of the visited URLs.

f.        Goal value – This is a very important field and one that is often over looked. Every goal on your site should have a monetized value.

By properly adding goals to your analytics page you gain a greater understanding of website performance. In associating value to each goal you can prioritize your actions to increase cumulative returns. Enabling Google Analytics on your website will provide you with essential information that has never before available to you. The data collected from your web page will allow you to shape the format of your website to better suit the needs of your intended customer, and promote an overall greater understanding of customer needs.

The first semester of my junior year was spent in Florence, Italy. I left in August to spend four months in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It was an amazing experience. Within a month of my arrival home it was time to ship back out to good ole TCNJ.  I spent the second semester of my junior year on the third floor Eickoff Hall, one of the nicer student housing options at The College of New Jersey.  It came complete with a desk, dresser, bed and in my case even windows (I was one of the lucky ones). But the best of college dorm living wouldn’t be complete without the most important thing of all, food. With a dining hall just down the stairs you would assume a majority of food consumption needs to be met, but you could not be more wrong. Ordering food becomes a ritual to most. With restaurant menus being shoved under your door daily the options are endless.

Image Source: TCNJMagazine.com

Now shoving menus underneath the doors of dorm rooms may seem like a foolproof way of distributing advertisements/menus, but believe it or not there is quite a lot of opposition to these efforts. A majority of the time the menus will just get kicked right back under the door, lining the floor with copy after copy of restaurant menus. There were sixty rooms on my floor, on an average week two to three menus slipped under each door, meaning more than 120-180 menus floating around per week. This massive waste of paper is where my quam begins, in an era where students are charged a nickel for every page printed; businesses are still not effectively using their resources. Just a simple conscience effort might offer the solution to this lack of efficiency, but there may be a more effective way; a method that reduces waste while using insights about your consumer to predict behavior and more efficiency use the resources available. For most small businesses this may sound like a daunting task, one that they would have to throw money at, whether it is an in house project or an outsourced effort. But in my opinion it doesn’t always have to be so complicated.

Image Source: fortgreene.thelocal.nytimes.com/tag/recycling/

It all starts with simple observation. I walk down the hallway and collect 30 #1 China menus, 16 Lovin’ Cookies brochures, 12 China House menus, and 12 Cookie’s R Us menus. What can these numbers tell me? And what other information is pertinent about these menus? Well first off the fact that 30 #1 China menus compared to 12 China House menus are left for dead in Eickoff hallways tells me China house is probably the more liked of the two Chinese restaurants. But there is much more information that can be derived from this minimal information, upon taking a closer look at the menus I find some distinct differences. The China house menu offers a coupon on the front page of their menu while #1 offers coupons on the back page. Could this be the cause for the extra 18 menus left outside? With some slight alterations to the #1 China menus we would be able to find out what kind of a difference this truly makes. Without a doubt there are also other small issues alike to this that could also be causing the differentiation. Another small piece of information received in picking up these menus are the doors in which they seem to come from. If any of these companies were to make note of these statistics they would be able to identify which dorm rooms are most interested and which ones are a complete waste of time. With this information they could save paper on residents who have already disregarded there restaurant by kicking the menu back out the door, and as a result lead a more targeted ad campaign.

Now let’s talk about the Cookie shop data, the same can be applied as above that if you can identify the doors not interested you can stop wasting menus on them, but an extraneous variable is presented here worth mentioning. Although Lovin’ Cookies has more menus left outside than Cookies R Us I believe Lovin’ Cookies possesses a larger market share than Cookies R Us. Rather than slipping menus under doors Lovin Cookies places them on door handles. Some of these get immediately ripped off onto the floor while others remain hanging outside for weeks. By putting the menus on the door handles it forces the customer to actually handle the menu a great technique to drive consumer action. Due to this differentiation in distribution method a real comparison between the two companies cannot actually be drawn.

All this information derived from one walk down the hallway, Can you believe it? Most small business owners don’t think analytics can do them any good, or are worth their time. But I’m here to tell you it most certainly is; analytics presents you with the ability to understand your customer. In pairing analytical efforts with a marketing campaign you can not only reach your consumer but reach the right consumer in the right way, and this can make all the difference.

In summation, I hope its clear how simple analytics truly are, and how apparent they are in our everyday life. With every observation comes insight, whether or not you make use of these insights for your business could make the difference between failure and success, I’d choose the latter.

Evan DiMeglio here! Allow me to tell you a little about myself. I am a senior at The College of New Jersey studying Business. I have the pleasure of interning for one of the best software development firms in America, Macrosoft Inc. located in Parsippany, NJ. Here I have been given the opportunity to work with many computer and software engineering minds.

A majority of my time spent here has been developing a new Android application called Simple Baseball Scoring HD. It is an application that aims to replace the old fashioned scorebooks of America’s pastime (Check out Simple Baseball Scoring HD on Facebook for more details).

I’ve also been working in the field of web analytics.Web analytics is a fast growing and mission critical business control field. Web analytics provide a hidden bevy of web information that can be used as insights into web design, marketing campaigns, and even ROI evaluations. This blog is aimed to show the ever presence of situations in which analytics and observation can reveal insights that can be used to help businesses or even start new ones.

1. Top Content Report

In the previous articles, we discussed about Gap Analysis in Web Analytics Tool Implementation, Requirement Analysis to Assess Web Analytics Tool’s Business-compatibility, and Tool Selection Checklist. After acquiring the right web analytics tool, the next question is how to get the most out of it. To answer this question, we’d like to present the web analytics series on the most useful metrics. We will start this series with Top Content report which is one of the most basic reports. Top Content report will provide a quick overview of your website’s performance in just a few minutes.

The Top Content report can be found under the Content section. It lists each page that received traffic.

Figure 1: Top Content location

Why is Top Content report important? It is an essential report as it identifies which page generates the most traffic to your website. Identify the top content pages bring you three advantages:

a) By knowing the top content pages, you know where to present decisive information whether it is an ad message of new line of products, or the call-to-action links to invite users to take action. You want important information to be consumed by visitors, which can be done easily when you know what the visitors view the most.

b) Once on the content detail report, you are able to analyze top content pages in four additional ways:

• Navigational Summary – Discover how visitors arrived at a given page and where they went to next.

• Entrance Paths – For a given entrance page, discover the next pages viewed and where they ended up.

• Entrance Sources – Top entrance sources per page (Ex. Google, Stumble upon, etc.)

• Entrance Keywords – Top entrance keywords per page.

Figure 2: Take advantage of Navigation Summary, Entrance Paths, Entrances Sources, and Entrance Keywords to improve your top pages.

c) When it comes to content, always combine many metrics together to have actionable insights. By combining the number of Unique Pageviews, Pageviews, % Exit, Bounce rate, Average time on page, we can do the why analysis. For example, let’s say the home page receives 129 pageviews with a bounce rate of 65.15% and an Exit percentage of 51.16%. These numbers not only tell us by what means the website attracts the traffic but that the content of the homepage is not relevant enough to keep the visitors. Low average time on page can be caused by irrelevant keywords leading to the homepage. This insight analysis will remind you to link the keywords to the right specific pages, instead of the general home page. Remember that visitors are not as patient as we think.

Figure 3: Some important metrics of Top Content report

By default, Google Analytics rank the top content pages by the number of pageviews. However, different businesses prioritize different metrics, so you should decide the most important metric to your business and sort it by clicking on the headings at the top of each column (as shown in figure 3). This report gives an overview of your website and a basic understanding of what’s going on with your website but its capacity reaches out even further. These simple web metrics can be used to gain insights into visitor behavior as well. By segmenting and/or filtering the data you can figure out how different groups of people consume and interact with your website content.

When looking at the data in a segmented way you will likely find that a given group of people make up a greater portion of traffic than the other. These different groups of people will also have differences for their visits and as a result be of different value to your company. Goals for different customer segments can be set to evaluate these visitors based on proper metrics. For example if you’re looking at traffic from paid search, you should find higher conversion rates and profits from these web users, while something like for first time visitors you would want to look where they exited from and their path while on your site.

2. Custom Reporting

The metrics shown in figure 3 are just the standard ones. You might need to add more metrics in your report, and Google Analytics make it easy for you by offering custom reporting with available dimensions and metrics as shown in figure 4.

Figure 4: Custom reporting

3. Page Name Customization

Another thing that needs attention is page names on Top Content report. By default, Google Analytics will present the page by its URL, for example /index.html and /a_wedding.html in figure 1. These URL path names are difficult to swift through and requires effort to map to understandable page names if your website has hundreds of pages. To avoid this, we can customize the GA code to present the name that you want on Top Content report.

To implement this tactic, you must first go to the Google Analytic snippet of the page you want to change the name of, and assign the descriptive pagename you want to see to the trackPageview function..

For example:

Figure 5: Amazon page example

By default the rest of the domain, “/books-used-books-textbooks/b/ref=sa_menu_bo8?ie=UTF8&node=283155,” will be shown as the name of this page in Top Content report. To avoid the long and confusing URL name above, you can name it with Book Category by editing the GA code of this page as below:

With this small change, you can make your report easy to consume with the straightforward page names. Having the right name will facilitate your process of finding the Top Content pages. It also helps you quickly identify how different user groups are finding/entering your site so that you can prioritize your marketing efforts to drive the right visitors to the relevant pages.

Insightbytes blog strives to provide you valuable WA experiences direct from customers and industry leaders using current Web Analytic Tools. As part of our ongoing WA Blog Series we had discussed Gap Analysis in Web Analytics Tool Implementation and Requirement Analysis to Assess Web Analytics Tool’s Business-compatibility. Articles in the WA Blog Series focus on measures that need to be taken by an organization to adopt Web Analytics best practices and tools. Third and final article in this series epitomizes the tool selection procedure with a checklist.

There is a multitude of strong WA tool options available on the market like Google Analytics, CoreMetrics, Omniture and Webtrends to name a few. We strongly favor fully exploring the capabilities of your current tools, process improvement and building your peoples’ resource capacity before considering adopting a new tool. However if switching to a new WA tool is inevitable, the following checklist will supplement the process.

Set up

The tool should provide ease-of-implementation, flexibility and level of sophistication in tagging structure and site profiles along with the following factors:

This checklist will facilitate the Web Analytics tool selection process. But before an organization embarks on its quest to find the perfect WA Tool, we must emphasize that extensive planning and research be conducted. Dedicated resources must be assigned to collect information, sit through tool sales pitches, read white papers, draw comparisons and provide an in-depth assessment of tools’ capabilities mapping the organization’s business needs. The whole process in itself is a cumbersome task and may take up to 3 to 6 months to reach a decision. However, organizations conducting the tool selection process rest assured that a WA Tool that matches your business analytics needs is definitely worth the wait.

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In our previous blog article Gap Analysis and Web Analytics Implementation we presented gap analysis methods and grids to assess challenges faced by an organization in implementing Web Analytics processes to supplement their business decision making. This leads us to the next phase in Web Analytics implementation which is Requirement Analysis to assess current processes and tool requirements.

We have defined three focus areas for Web Analytics requirement analysis:

• Process Requirements
• Resource and Knowledge Requirements
• Tool Requirements

Process Requirements

Resource and Knowledge Requirements

Tool Requirements

Requirement analysis allows you to ask key questions about your business’s need for a new tool, resource development and process improvement. In most cases it is widely beneficial to fully explore the capabilities of the current tool, improve knowledge and resources of people working with the tool and implement better reporting insights to interpret valuable information. An organization may only need to reorganize teams, train people and fix process to bring a shift in analytics culture and begin making informed decision based on web analytics data.

If switching to a new web analytics tool is inevitable, you will find our next article in the WA series helpful: Web Analytics Tool Selection Checklist (coming soon). Subscribe now to get this article directly sent to your inbox.

Key feature of web analytics implementation in any organization begins with an assessment of current technology standing. An effective way to begin is to assess processes and gaps to gauge the organization’s readiness in implementing web analytics. At the same time it is high priority to define realistic goals intelligible across the organization. Web analytics goals essentially measure effectiveness of online business strategy while bringing different specific departmental goals to consideration as well. Well defined goals chart the destination and help web analytics flag bearers map out strategies to achieve business goals.

Requirement gathering is a good measure to begin the gap analysis process. Requirement gathering is a science in itself and can be achieved using various individual and intermixed strategies like document analysis, focus group, interface analysis, stakeholder interviews, work observation, assessment workshops and targeted surveys. Based on our industry experience, InsightBytes advocates the use of interview methodology to capture the stakeholder goals and expectation directly and quickly. Interview questions may be grouped into topic specific areas, summarized below.

Questions covering these Web Analytics suggested areas must be put forth in a conversational tone so as to make the interviewee comfortable to talk freely, yet still to get the points being measured. It is required that the interviewers have a high level of communication and group facilitation skills.

Business Goals and Outcomes

Interviewing people focusing on this area of web analytics allows us to determine how well they understand expected visitor behavior, site goals and the utilization of web property’s impact on their company’s core business. The following topics may be addressed while interviewing this group:

• Impact of web analytics data on business decision making
• Usage of web analytics results in key business tasks
• Applicability of results utilized from the Marketing campaign analysis
• Level of satisfaction with Marketing campaign analysis
• Online channel driven goal definition including social media and web properties
• Perceiving contribution of web properties interaction to facilitate in goal achievement
• Improvement potential in effectiveness by making individual job descriptions clear and sound

Data Integration

Web analytics data integration can be quite a challenge when it comes to internal vs. external, online vs. offline and analyzing insights based on this data. Interviewing people focusing on this area of web analytics allows us to measure how well they identify all data sources and to understand all data integration needs and challenges. These goals can be extended to understand the importance of report consolidation and standardization. The following topics may be addressed while interviewing this group:

• The necessity of  accessing the historical data
• The limit of historical data available with web analytics tool (which is a period of 2 years for Google Analytics)
• Integration requirements for the data gathered from online and onsite resources
• Integration requirements of the interaction of web properties
• The necessity of having site tracking data integrated with internal systems
• The importance of internal site tracking with 3rd party online campaign tracking tools
• Management methods for the situation that web property data tracked and reported on by multiple parties
• The importance of consolidating the tracking and reporting process
• The methods to integrate web analysis data into database like Excel, Access or something more specific like SQL
• The option of using Google API
• Feasibility analysis on available data sets

Reporting

Interviewing people focusing on this area of web analytics allows us to ascertain how well they understand the current reporting landscape in terms of periodic dashboards as well as ad-hoc reports. It also enables us to understand effectiveness of current reports in the terms that whether they provide actionable insights in optimizing marketing tactics and reaching business goals. The following topics may be addressed while interviewing this group:

• The flow of reports
• Identification of all data sources used in corresponding reports
• Define the reporting structure, for example receivers, frequency, format, and content
• Employing the use of web analytics dashboard(s)
• Types of ad-hoc reporting required or being used and their frequency
• RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) being used in the websites like video, Flash, Ajax pop-ups, etc.
• Using segmentation to break down reports while analyzing and the necessity of advanced segmentation
• Usage of campaign attribution model in site conversions

Support

Interviewing people focusing on this area of web analytics allows us to determine how well they understand the nature and level of support that stakeholders expect on web traffic analysis. The following topics may be addressed while interviewing this group:

• Current web analytics support available from web analytics tool vendor and internal team members
• Satisfaction with Web Analytics vendor’s stability/reliability

Privacy

Interviewing people focusing on this area of web analytics allows us to assess how well they understand the nature and level of privacy issues involved in data gathering, segmentation, analysis, during implementation and reporting. The following topics may be addressed while interviewing this group:

• Existing privacy methods and issues
• Expectation of the privacy/security in existing web properties
• Information tracking restrictions and how they are being addressed

Mobile

Interviewing people focusing on this area of web analytics allows us to weigh how well they understand mobile tracking and development of mobile business properties.

• Existing vs. projected standing of mobile tracking across the organization including types of mobile apps and traffic volumes being served by each
• Report types for mobile properties and projected use of mobile properties in the future

Once the interview process is complete, all data collected needs to be sorted out and analyzed to assess an overall standing of the state of Web Analytics in an organization.  Here are some suggested gap grids to help in that process. We have developed these gap grids as a methodology to sort data for gap analysis and they may be used with prior written permission from author.

The grid allows us to prioritize information from perspective of key stakeholders in an organization like managers, sales and marketing, IT, external agencies and analytics. It also allows us to determine the effort required to overcome gaps; attacking the highest importance item with the lowest effort required.

Gap grid provides a clear picture of challenges faced by an organization in implementing Web Analytics processes to supplement their business decision making. It allows us to measure the organization’s preparedness for Web Analytics and define possible improvement targets. Hence effective decisions can be made to ensure that best Web Analytics tool choices are made. There are many web analytics tools available in the markets for example Omniture, Web Trends, Click Tracks, CoreMetrics, HBX to name a few. Gap analysis results could drive an organization to use a mix of web analytics tools but most importantly it allows them to assess all the factors that play into effectiveness of web traffic analysis including internal and external resources and skill sets, business procedures and other tangible and intangible constraints.