Many traditional marketing directors & coordinators are just starting to dip their feet into online analytics. They have Google Analytics or Omniture setup and check their stats from time to time, but are they really understanding the metrics that are in front of them? More importantly, are they efficiently utilizing their website’s analytics to improve their campaigns results and reduce their client acquisition costs?

Website analytics are a marketers dream. We invest some money, check the results, reconstruct the campaign and then try it again, constantly refining the outcome. In contrast to traditional marketing, online marketing analytics provides a fine level of control on the results you are generating.

You can make a big impact in the success of your companies website, even if you only spend a few hours a week reviewing your website’s analytics. (Not to be confused with spending just 4 hours a week on your entire online marketing strategy!) Let’s take a peak at some key metrics and Google Analytics tips.

Bounce Rate on your Landing Pages

* Not to be confused with Site-wide Bounce Rate average. (as seen on the dashboard)

• <60% Very Good
• 61-80% Average
• >81% Needs Improvement

It’s important to examine your landing pages for these statistics, not just your site average. If you have a blog for example you might find that a lot of your visitors are existing customers looking for free support. They may visit 5-10 articles within your blog and completely ignore your lead generation pages. In this case, your overall site bounce rate would be very low which isn’t an accurate representation of the effectiveness of your landing pages.

Average Time of Site and Pages per Visit

These two metrics are far less useful than you might first expect. They are easily skewed on sites that contain blogs/forums or other types of non-sales related, valuable material.

Time on Page on your Landing Pages

* Not to be confused with Average Time on Site

• >60 seconds Good
• 30-59 seconds Average
• <30 seconds Needs Improvement

This will vary greatly depending on the length of the copy on your landing pages. Take a moment and skim through your landing pages. Don’t read every word because your visitors certainly aren’t! How long did you average? That will become your “Good” indicator.

The amount of time your visitors spend on your landing pages is a good indicator of how interested they are in what you’re talking about or offering. If you’re not seeing a lot of conversions from a page that is attracting long page views it’s an excellent sign that success is right around the corner with some additional tweaking.

Filter yourself from your Reporting

If you’re like most of the partners we work with then you, and your staff, are always on on your business’ website referencing documents and directing customers to specific pages.

If you have an in-house web development team then they are likely on your website every day updated and tweaking your content.

All of these visits can significantly skew your statistics and reporting. If your website is only getting 500 visitors a month, there’s a high chance that as much as 25% of that traffic is internal. With more popular websites, 2000 visitors a month and up, this difference is less noticeable but it can still skew your conversion rates, bounce rates and especially your average time on page.

There are a variety of ways to filter yourself out of your Google Analytics reporting. We prefer the IP based filter but you can also try the cookie method.

Segmenting your Branded Keywords

Pop quiz:

Q: If your website get’s 600 visitors a month from search engines, how many new prospects are finding your website through search engines?

A: Unless your excluding your companies name, url, and your first & last name from your keyword statement reporting.. you have no idea!

The key here is “new prospects”, which by definition are “unaware of your business”.

You need to segment the visitors who are searching for your brand from your reporting so that you are left with the keyword statements that a new prospect would be searching for.

How to filter branded keywords:

This can be accomplished the proper way or the quick and dirty way, as described below.

In Google Analytics, click on “Traffic Sources” on the left and then “Keywords”.

You should see something like “Search sent 685 total visits via 507 keywords”

Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on “Advanced Filter.”

After clicking on “Advance Filter” you’ll see something like the above.

The goal here is to exclude the different keyword variations your *existing customers* would be familiar with.

Using “ABC Computers” as an example I would want to filter out the following keyword variations:

• ABC Computers
• ABCComputers
• ABC Computer
• ABCComputer
• ABCComputers.com
• www.ABCComputers.com
• A B C Computers
• etc, etc…

I would also exclude the business owners name from the results for additional accuracy.

The result will tell you how many times, and through which keyword statements, you’re currently being found through. While these numbers will vary from site to site, we would expect at least 75% of a website’s search engine traffic to be from “new prospects”.

If you’re seeing the opposite, 75% of your traffic is coming from visitors already familiar with your company, then your Search Engine Marketing is in bad shape.

Conversion Goals

Setting up conversion goals properly is one of the more difficult, but absolutely essential tasks,  in modern analytics.

Before you start fiddling with the knobs and settings, it’s important to identify:

1. What are the actions you want your prospects to accomplish?
   Do you want them to complete a contact form, a quote request, a whitepaper download, a webinar registration, signup for a newsletter, etc, etc
2. At what point would you determine that action to be a success?
   Generally, after the prospect has completed the signup form and is presented with the “Success” message.
3. What exact page/url will the prospect be on when they hit that “success” page?
   This is where it can get tricky if you’re using AJAX or have the same thank you page for multiple different conversion goals. For additional assistance here, consult a professional.

After you’ve answered the 3 questions above you’re ready to setup Google Analytics Conversion Tracking. Here are a few resources to help you get started:

• Advanced Google Analytics: Conversion Goals Wrapup
• Analytics Help: How do I set up goals and funnels?
• Google Analytics 101 – Setting Goals and User Tips (Video)

Has this been helpful?

Let us know by posting a comment below.

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