What typically happens is that a company will devise a plan to improve their online marketing and will implement various changes as a result — but then, nobody remembers to measure the impact of these changes or otherwise conduct any sort of followup down the road. Email marketing pieces, AdWords changes, even new landing pages are added to a marketing campaign; yet the “when,” “how” and “who” are lost in the ether.

Below are some steps you can take to help you remember your activities, analyze their impact, and create a journal of your marketing efforts that will benefit you and even your successor for years to come.

Annotations

First, the obvious: Google Analytics Annotations. I use these frequently to note things I changed on a website or within an AdWords account, as well as mark the dates of off-site (or even offline) marketing efforts that might impact traffic and conversions. Some of the things I advise all clients to note with Annotations are:

• Email blasts
• Website content changes
• New design/feature launches
• New/updated PPC campaigns
• New/updates referral site campaigns
• Newspaper ad or TV ad launch/runs

Here’s the crazy awesome benefit of doing these annotations: you have a record of what you did and when you did it. You would be surprised to see how many people are not taking advantage of this amazingly useful tool.

Anyway, let’s say you’ve implemented a new PPC campaign/adgroup, and you’ve annotated it – now what?

Use the annotation to set dates in Google Analytics – and measure impacts. Here’s an example:

Client A set up a new AdWords campaign and annotated that the start date was 5/23/2013.  From here, they can adjust the date range around the annotation to see the impact of that campaign. By setting the dates to the week before the launch through the week after, we can see if the new campaign had a significant impact on visits, clicks, bounce, time on site, etc.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the campaign’s impact has been incremental, at best. I can relay that this campaign has not increased conversions or revenue at all yet — though, a week is a very brief amount of time from which to draw conclusions.  Still, it gives you an idea of how you can manipulate the data to help you determine campaign impacts.

Here’s something that would stump me if I hadn’t used annotations:

According to my annotation, I implemented a plugin on this date that allowed me to track off-site clicks as events. (For an affiliate marketing site, this is very valuable information.)  As you can see — and as I predicted in my annotation — doing so had an obvious impact on my bounce rates.

When someone working on the site looks at this a year from now, they’ll see the big drop, note the activity that caused it, and move on. By making a note, I’m saving myself and my whole team time by not forcing them to investigate the issue.

One thing to keep in mind is that even adjustments made within Google Analytics are not automatically annotated. (Wouldn’t this be a great feature? Hint, hint!)  So, you’re going to have to help yourself by remembering to make these notes a habit. I’ll share a checklist at the bottom of this post to help you do just that.

One downfall of annotations at this time is that you cannot export your annotation list for a report. (Again, Google Analytics team: Hint, hint!). I usually copy and paste them into an Excel sheet and clean it up; if you have more than one or two, this seems like the easiest way to handle it. You can also just grab a screenshot of the annotations between your target dates.

There are other options for keeping track of your marketing activities and their impacts. Some work in tandem with Analytics and some could work on their own. I generally recommend a combination of whatever works best for your team. The end goal in any system should be:

• Easy understanding of what you did, when you did it
• Quick date capture so you can easily measure impacts
• Effective way to pull down information, be it activities or analytics, and understand how the change correlates to the data. You could insert an age-old correlation vs. causation argument here; I’ll leave that one alone for now.

Change History

Within Google Analytics and Google AdWords, you can pull a report that details all changes made on the account within a specified time period. This is useful when working within the platform, but it doesn’t really help you track what you did and when if the change was made outside of Analytics or AdWords. I recommend using this as you populate your annotations to make notes on when a new AdGroup was started, or when you implemented a new goal.

Calendars

If you’re a calendar user — and, more specifically, a Google Calendar user — you can set up a really useful calendar that is shared and editable by your whole team. Color code your calendar so it’s not confused with other calendars you might have access to, and create a note that tags the activity you performed with a date and time associated.

Using a calendar system allows you to create a follow-up calendar event right away. For example, if you made an event reminding you to launch a new AdWords campaign, you could create a follow-up event to check on the results of that campaign a week or a month later. This allows you to “set it and forget it,”  as you’re relying on a tool to help you remember something you have to do down the road.

Google Docs

Being able to share a document with your team can be an invaluable memory tool. If everyone can contribute to one document in one place, without having to worry about who has the most recent version, you’re saving time and headaches.

I use Google Docs a lot for collaboration. I also keep a daily journal of activities performed for each client so I can refer back to it constantly and use it to write monthly or quarterly reports. It takes almost no time at all, and it’s available in the “cloud” so I can access it anywhere.

A Checklist For Tracking Activities

• Do your marketing activity (send the email blast, launch the new AdWords campaign. publish the new landing page, etc.).
• Add an annotation to Google Analytics noting what you did and when you did it; sometimes time stamps are important, so note the hour you made the change if necessary.
• Create a calendar item that notes what you did and when you did it.
• Create a follow-up reminder in your calendar. It can be once in 3 weeks, or weekly for 3 months — this is why the flexibility of a calendar is great.
• Write up a quick journal entry that outlines your theory behind the campaign and what your goals are.
• Let it leave your mind — a clear mind is a productive mind, so use the tools and let them help you be more effective!

For most clients, I advise some sort of combination of calendar events, journal entries and annotations. The annotations are there so you can see the results of an activity within analytics. The calendar is extremely useful to help you remember what to follow up on (and when). A journal is really useful if you’re having trouble remembering why you did something in the first place.

Using these tools in combination creates a powerful system that can help you drive your marketing to the next level. The best part? All of these tools are absolutely, 100% free!

Creating a website that attracts visitors via search engine optimization is one part of the equation; engaging the users to read your content, search and come back for more is another facet of online marketing. As I explained last week, I do think how well people engage with your content may be, or may become, a type of ranking factor. It would at least be a relevancy metric that Google might use. Engaging readers just makes sense, not only from a Search point of view, but from a business point of view.

I track scroll depth using a WordPress plugin called the Google Analytics Suite and have found the information to be pretty valuable. If you don’t use WordPress, check out the advice given in last month’s article, How to Measure Content Engagement and Effectiveness with Analytics & WordPress  and implement Justin Cutroni’s method on your website.

Insert “Clues” In Your URLs

I recommend using “clues” in your URLs to help you test content. I’m sure there are other ways you can do this, but this is my favorite way – and it helps me remember to describe what a page is about very carefully. For example, for my cooking website I use the clues “Recipe” “How to” and “Infographic” to help me determine which kinds of content are popular with readers.

Note: I do not recommend going back and changing URLs, that’s not a good idea, but as you move forward start adding a clue in the URL as to what kind of content is contained within the post/page.

Once you have started to add enough clues to your URLs to gather a representative sample set of scroll data, you can then start digging in and seeing what types of content engage your users to scroll, and which types don’t necessarily instill scrolling confidence.  The first thing I do is look at the base ‘Scroll Depth’ data under events.

Once there, I look at the “Event Label” view to see the following

Now that I have the scroll depth data, I’m ready to build the custom segment. This will use our URL “clues” to show sets of data by scroll depth.  To build an advanced segment click on “Advanced Segments” and “Create New Advanced Segment”

Create a new custom segment that includes “or” statements for your “clues.” It will look something like this

Name & save your advanced segment – I like to name mine something easy to understand. Something like “content effectiveness test” so I can find it easily. Your data will now show your test URLs compared to your scroll depth data.  Make sure you’re looking at Event Label and add the secondary dimension for the page URL.  Your final report will look like this.

We can then filter by event label if you’d like. What I can see from this data is that most popular posts do not get more than a 25% scroll rate. This means we need to tweak content on these pages to encourage more engagement.

Ideas For Increasing Engagement

My previous article mentioned one way (falsely, in my opinion) to increase engagement is to use pagination. This will inflate page views, and I believe it’s a false way to measure engagement. As a user it seems counter intuitive to have to keep clicking to “page 2″ to get the content (or the rest of the content) I want. Why didn’t I just land on page 2 in the first place?

Here are some user-friendly tips I came up with for encouraging engagement with your content – I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments as well!

• Use better graphics. Great photos tell a story, much like the words on the page. If you use better graphics that encourage a reader to continue to engage with the story, you can increase scroll depth.
• For my recipe posts, I’m thinking of doing more photo tutorials that show pictures of the recipe preparation step by step to encourage more scrolling – and deliver the printable recipe at the bottom. You could add more photos to any type of post.  This could pull the reader down the page to “see what’s next.”
• You could also use more bulleted text to encourage skimming down the page.
• Bold main ideas in each paragraph – this encourages the reader to keep going to get all of the main points quickly and easily.
• Train your readers to expect something “tasty” at the end of a page or post.  I like the idea of delivering 1 or 2 action items at the end of each post that encourages them to see it through to the end to get the “reward” for reading.
• Write shorter posts. Can you say what you need to say in 400 words instead of 800? If you can, and you can get your point across, why not?  You could split your idea in to two posts and create twice as many pages for your website.

Going beyond the search and keyword into how those keywords bring the visitor into content they either read or don’t read, is the next step beyond basic Google Analytics. Many in the industry believe a fast bounce from your page back to the search results is a negative in Google’s eyes. That user is basically voting your content down, saying “this isn’t what I wanted when I entered this specific query.”

If this is true, and I happen to believe it is or it will be, reducing bounce rate by investigating user behavior is a great way to increase your chances of a nice ranking for any given phrase. Nice ranking plus amazing user-pleasing content equals goal achievement. You can picture how this works in a circle.

How long are folks staying on a page, and how much scrolling are they really doing? I’d like to explore some ideas I have for measuring visitor engagement with a page of content.

First, you have to have good content. If you’re struggling along to get 300 words on a page that contains 3-4 keyword phrases and no care as to what the user does after they land, then you probably really don’t care about this. If you’re writing with an eye toward engaging the reader and retaining them as a reader and a consumer of some sort, then this will be of interest; read on, MacDuff.

Google Analytics

There are simple and difficult ways to track page engagement with Google Analytics. Event tracking is the easiest way; however, there are easy and complicated ways to implement and trigger the events you desire.

Scroll Depth

You can set events to trigger as a user scrolls to or past a certain point on the page. I love the idea, but I haven’t gotten it to work yet without using a WordPress plug-in. That doesn’t mean it can’t work, it just means it’s a bit too complicated to implement for a coding novice like myself.

If you’re interested in implementing this type of tracking on a non-WordPress site, check out this article by Justin Cutroni – and this one at Savio.no. They go through setting up the event step by step. If you have WordPress, you’re in luck. Keep reading!

Rating Events

I like the idea of creating a button at the end of your content that contains a simple thumbs up or thumbs down voting capability. You could also use a star rating system if you like. If the reader scrolls down to the buttons and clicks either one, that can trigger an event in your Google Analytics dashboard. This tells you that they at least scrolled down the page.

It can also help you understand what content the reader might like or dislike. Getting these votes is not the easiest thing in the world, so you would need a good amount of traffic to your site to ensure a representative sample vote.

Pagination Of Content

This is probably my least favorite way to deliver content. Many big news magazines do it, and I’m convinced it’s purely to show a low bounce rate and a high “pages-per-visit” so they can charge more for advertising. That being said, putting event tracking on the “page 2″ of the article can help you understand how many people are reading at least to the bottom of page 1.

In-Page Analytics

I don’t think this feature is used enough by even heavy Google Analytics users. Granted, when it was first available, it was a hot mess and not very useful. Today, it’s a different animal. There are still some weird features that you need to be aware of – if more than one link goes to the same page from the page you’re looking at – every link to that page reports the same number.

For example – my home button, the WordPress admin bar home button, and my header logo all link to my homepage, but all are used very differently. Google reports that 8.3% of users – an equal number – used all three ways to get to my homepage. That’s not a true statement; Google is combining their clicks because they all point at the same page. This is a feature that needs to be fixed, but doesn’t completely render this tool useless.

I know from In-Page Analytics that nobody is using my social media links in the upper right hand side of the page. I need to redesign that feature to promote engagement. No clicks means nobody is using them, and I need to do something about that.

WordPress

While there are plug-ins and other content management systems that many people use to create and update their blogs, I am strictly a WordPress user. If you use Drupal or Joomla, sorry, I can’t help. I have found there are some great WordPress plug-ins that can help you track content engagement; some even report that right into the events section of Google Analytics; and, all are free.

Google Analytics Suite

The Google Analytics Suite plug-in will hook into your Google Analytics and AdSense accounts and report page views, scroll depth, page speed, downloads and AdSense links as events. It is really simple to set up, and it hooks in easily to your Google Analytics account. The results are nice.

Below is information on scroll depth in Event tracking, just a few hours after installation. Now, you can see how far down your page the reader got. You can also see this data in Real Time event tracking.

Google Analytics For WordPress By Yoast

I really enjoy this Google Analytics plugin by Yoast de Valk. It’s easy to install and configure, and it reports on a variety of events.  Justin Cutroni stated in his blog post referenced above that scroll depth would be implemented in the Event Tracking on this plug-in; but, I don’t see evidence of that yet.

What I love about this tool is the ability to track exit links and affiliate links. If you link out to a lot of sites, you can easily see those as “exit links” as opposed to exit pages – where your visitor just disappears. This is something that Indextools/Yahoo Web Analytics used to do very well, and Google never did very nicely.

Outbound clicks are tracked as page views, so they’re easy to isolate in your Analytics dashboard under “Site Content” and “All Pages.”

Knowing how users interact with your pages is as important as knowing users are getting to your pages. Whether you share recipes or sell computers, understanding how your users behave once they land on any page of your site helps you write the content that best suits their needs.

You cannot know or understand user behaviors without analytics. Try one, two, or all of the methods shared above until you find the piece that fits with your site and your setup. Once you understand the type of content users engage with, and what form or shape they’re most likely to read, you can write and share more content more efficiently.

Postscript: It was pointed out in the comments that I missed a few configuration steps that make these tools even more valuable.

While the Yoast plugin is really useful, he actually recommends tracking outbound clicks as events, not pageviews. Under Advanced Settings in the Plugin Settings — make sure you have not checked the box that says “Track Outbound Links as Pageviews.” My installation had it checked.

When looking at InPage Analytics, Google announced a fix that sets attribution by link, not by landing page. You will need to alter your analytics code slightly — the directions are fairly easy to follow on this blog post.

Thanks so much to SearchEngineMan and Paul Thompson for helping me ensure the accuracy of my article.

One mistake I see many novice and new-to-analytics marketers fall into is ending their research path at the Revenue report in the E-commerce section of Google Analytics. While knowing how much revenue your products are generating is important, there’s more than just direct revenue. While the argument can, and should, be made for engagement being a form of ROI, I’m actually referring to referral paths and assisted conversions.

I think the information contained in the reports below the “E-commerce” section is important, but perhaps can be confusing; really, anything in the multi-channel funnel section of the site is pretty intimidating to a novice analytics user. I’d like to take some of the confusion out of these reports in an effort to encourage beginners to delve into their information more often.

Your Top Conversion Paths

First, be aware that interactions are just that, interactions – a user might have more than one sales interaction in any given period of time. This is useful data, but you cannot just add these numbers to your revenue numbers and get a number. It doesn’t happen that way. You do need to be aware of these numbers, though. Understanding that visitors use many different ways to reach your website before they buy is an important step toward understanding what channels drive useful traffic

Looking at your channel traffic and your top conversion paths can help clear up where important traffic comes from. I don’t think people quite understand what a conversion path looks like until they see this. Seeing evidence of the different methods people use to find a site really opens eyes to the importance of a varied approach to your online marketing.

For instance, paid advertising can support organic placement and conversions. Social media can be the doorway for a new user to find your brand, and supports paid, organic, and direct revenues. There are many different ways to look at the data. The standard overview tells a good story.

Using Filters To Drill Into The Data

If we drill into the data – we can see even more. Use the filter feature to look at any path that includes a specific channel. I can see how much revenue involved an organic click, or a social media referral – that’s important data to have when you’re trying to convince accounting, or the c-suite, that it’s worth the investment. Many times, in-house or agency account managers need ammunition to defend their desire to play in more than just one or two fields. This report helps us do that – and includes the revenue numbers that correspond to these channels.

Just looking at the first page of the standard report itself can tell a small portion of the story, but digging in and filtering the data can tell us so much more. The first page of the standard report is impressive – it shows a variety of channel paths:

But, if we just look at the first page, we have no idea which channels included a social network referral that sent nearly $5,000 in revenue during the month – that’s a significant chunk!

We can take the data here a step further and look at which social networks are assisting the conversions by drilling into the data.  From the Top Conversion Path report, add a secondary dimension for “Source Path.”

Adding Secondary Dimension Filters

Now that we can see the grouping path, and the source path – we see the actual websites included in the organic, paid, social, and referral clicks in the secondary dimension. There are hundreds, if not thousands of paths – so we need to filter to group things together a bit more. We’ll use the advanced search function to do this. Click on Advanced next to the search box and create an advanced search that looks like this:

We can now see every conversion that contained a social network component, and group them together by social network. Filter by only the “Basic Channel Grouping Path” of “Social” if you want to see all conversions that included a social network click; add the second dimension of “Social Path” if you want to see the data for a specific social network. Below, we see the conversion paths that contained a Facebook click.

You can change the source path to Twitter or Pinterest – whichever network you want to explore, and click Apply. Now, you see every conversion path that contains a Facebook click.

You can complete these same steps to see Paid Search channels by engine, or organic. You can make your secondary dimension a keyword and see how keywords and organic search assist in future sales. Sometimes, standard data is enough to tell us whether a keyword or a referral is worth it; sometimes, we need to dig a little deeper to see the whole story.

Google Analytics Solution Gallery

Last week, Google announced an effort to make finding such solutions even more easily available for anyone using Google Analytics.  The Google Analytics Solution Gallery features solutions focused on campaigns dedicated to branding, e-commerce, lead generation and more.

The interface is a nice feature, and allows you to select the Type of report, the solution you seek, and the marketing function you want to track, giving you a list of related dashboards,advanced segments and custom reports. All are easy to install by simply clicking “download” and choosing the correct Analytics profile from your Analytics account.

Solution Gallery Features

There were some really great features in the Gallery. I really liked the Custom Advanced Segments that let you see Top Ad Slot and Right Hand Side Ad Position reports.  This lets you look at the effectiveness of the top of the page vs. the right hand side of the page for Google AdWords positioning. Maximizing your return on investment means looking at ad position as well as keyword phrases.

The SEO Referring Pages report was really nice. It shows the referring URL so you can view the pages that are sending visitors to your site. This is helpful so you can see the URL of sites that send traffic to your site. Social URLs like Google Plus and Facebook don’t resolve nicely, but if you filter them out – you get some really valuable data. I added these referring URLs to my link tracker in RavenTools so I can keep up with when links come and go to my websites.

Advanced Custom Filters

I’m also intrigued by the 3, 4, 5 & 6-word advanced custom filters. While I think being able to analyze your long-tail traffic is important, I’d rather have this in a dashboard that allowed me to see all 4 in one spot with e-commerce information included – so I built one – click here to add it to your Analytics installation. You could also take the same info and build a set of custom reports that include more information. Right now, the dashboard I built just lists the phrases, visits and revenue.

Beyond providing the solutions to your Analytics issues, this resource offers the ability to find portions of information in a variety of formats and gives you the opportunity to piece them together into a solution that works for you. Think of each filter, dimension, metric, etc., as an individual Lego you can use to sculpt your own Analytics super hero reports.

There were some things that didn’t work quite right for me. One report, the Advanced Publisher Dashboard, which I thought had a ton of potential, referenced a bunch of events and goals that needed to be set up, but didn’t say in the instructions, “you need to set up these 7 goals/events for this to work.”

With that information, this report could be crazy useful. You could reverse engineer the dashboard to figure out what to do, but it takes a bunch of time. Again – the concepts are good, but the execution wasn’t that great.

I was not really surprised to see the most helpful custom filter for handling (Not Provided) data unavailable here. Google is not a big fan of getting around [not provided] and this is likely the reason.

Good For Novice Marketers

The drawbacks, as well as the opportunities, all reinforce the need to look at multiple sources for solutions, not just the gallery Google provides. In all honesty, I couldn’t have built the dashboard I shared above without the gallery, because writing the regular expressions is beyond my skill set  This levels the playing field for many Analytics users that were only able to use Google Analytics out of the box. That’s a pretty significant opportunity to novice marketers.

With all of these new positions come a large number of employees who are making their first foray into the world of Social Media. They may have been promoted from within, from another department, or maybe they previously handled SEO or paid search ads within the marketing department.

Many companies take a gamble that pays off on new-to-the-industry go-getters with not a lot of experience but tons of drive and passion.

Search vs. Social Media Engagement

The reality here, in most cases, is that measuring the success of social media is much different than measuring the success of a paid advertising or SEO effort. There’s so much more to Social Media, and engagement is something I’ve talked about in previous articles.

Measuring engagement is just as important as measuring revenue. Smart companies know that a social media strategy is about building a brand, and building brand advocates; so, when the need arises, they know exactly where to fulfill that need – their website.

So, more than just measuring purchases, and revenue – engagement must be a goal. The sticky wicket in this equation is measurement. I have come up with some ideas for measuring engagement, and revenues, for new social media community managers.

I talked in depth about measuring engagement in a previous article, Reporting on Social Media Engagement. What I want to talk about today is how to justify the Social Media Management position through insightful analytics. It’s important. It can be part of another role in a company, or a role unto itself, but there should be someone to lead the charge of your social media efforts.

Custom Reports

Make sure you’re using custom reports to show engagement and revenue from social media channels. Also, be sure you’re watching the multi-channel funnels section of Google Analytics, specifically the Assisted Conversions and Top Conversion Paths report. Top conversion paths is a great way to see the nuances of a visitor before they buy.

Advanced Segments

Create a custom advanced segment that outlines the social media sources where you’re active. This makes it very easy to show your impact on any given standard report, simply by choosing the correct advanced segment. Here’s how you do it.

First, look at the referral traffic report and pick out all referrers where you’re doing business. For this example, I’ve chosen Pinterest, Facebook & Twitter. Now, click on Advanced Segments in the top of the page.

Then, choose “New Custom Segment” from the far right side of the page – the image below is cropped, so it will be further to the left.

Now, name your advanced segment; I name mine what they are – so, “Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter” and start adding your includes.  Here’s how mine looks right before I save it

We don’t need any “and” includes here. Add as many sites as you like. By choosing the qualifier “containing” you’ll get anything that contains that root domain. Once you’ve filled in the steps above, choose “Preview Segment” and see how it looks. This keeps your Custom Segment Building screen open, but adjusts the data below to be in line with what you’ve chosen as your custom segment.

Make tweaks as appropriate and then choose “Save Segment.” You’ll then be able to choose this Advanced Segment from any standard or custom report within Google AdWords. This is very helpful when you’re looking at conversion funnels, paths, visits, etc. from other search channels as well.

I can now look at demographic information just for my social media visitors, finding out where they’re coming from.

I can look at Google Analytics’ canned engagement report, choose the Social Sources segment and see the engagement of only social media visitors.

Benchmark Data

You can see the value in being able to quickly determine your Social Media Work’s impact on the bottom line. Don’t become ensconced in this custom filter though, it’s important to weigh your work against the whole, as well as see how your work gains against the whole. Benchmarks work well for this.

Consider benchmarking and measuring the following for Social Media goals and achievements:

• Percent of Visits from Social Media
• Percent of Visits from type of social media (Here, you look at the breakdown of Social Media visitors. How many from Pinterest, Facebook, etc. This is available under the Social Overview section under the Traffic Sources section in Google Analytics.)
• Percent of Revenue from Social Media
• Bounce rate from Social Media Visitors when compared to bounce rate from all visitors

Entrance Paths & Social Sources

I also like to move around in the landing pages report, drilling in to the Entrance Paths section while my Social Sources custom segment is active. Here’s how it looks:

Basically, you highlight the landing page on the left, and it will show you the pages the visits exited from on the right. This can help you determine which pages hold the social media user’s attention, and which pages don’t interest them.

If you see a large number of exits from a particular page, you can then work on changing this page to make it more appealing to a social media user, or possibly creating specific landing pages shown only to your social media users.

As you can see, the tracking possibilities are endless. There is a lot of data, and much of it is extremely overwhelming. Keeping it simple, understanding the traffic you’re impacting, and that segment’s impact on the whole can help you fine-tune your efforts more quickly and effectively.

The inquirer was interested in the benefits or drawbacks to both reports, also asking if they were interchangeable. I figured this was a great question to answer in the Search & Analytics field, so I’ll do my best to define and give my opinion regarding the pros, cons and interchangeability of these two complex reports.

First, we need to understand what each report provides data-wise. Let’s take a look at the basic data available for each one.

Matched Search Queries Report

This report offers insights into the keywords searched for that lead to paid advertising conversions. This report only includes AdWords data. Its standard information, without altering and creating custom reports based on this report, includes the following:

• Visits
• Pages per Visit
• Average Visit Duration
• % New Visits
• Bounce Rate
• Goal Completions
• Revenue

The e-commerce tab of the report offers additional data:

• Transactions
• Average Value
• E-commerce Conversion Rate
• Per Visit Value

With this data, I can apply advanced filters, or custom filters, to single out a variety of segments of traffic. I can also look at search query versus landing page or exit page data using the secondary dimension feature. This data is much easier to manipulate.

With the matched search query report, we also have the option of looking at the data by match type. Knowing what types of keywords lead to the most revenue can help you make decisions about how you bid on keywords, as well as what types of keywords are worth the impressions as you build up to creating conversions.

I found it very interesting that in the data sample I looked at, Exact match keywords created more visits and more conversions, but less revenue overall. Broad match keywords created nearly double the revenue, with half the transactions. Phrase match keywords had the fewest visits and conversions, along with the lowest per-visit value.

Pros & Cons For Matched Search Queries Report

Below is the list of pros and cons for the Matched Search Queries Report.

Pros

• Shows data by match type
• Can apply Advanced Segments to this data easily, which is helpful if you’ve built custom segments by demographic or geographic location
• Can compare PPC performance against organic performance, overall performance, or just specific segments of traffic fairly easily
• Easily see e-commerce data applied to each keyword, and to each match type
• View keyword data by landing page

Cons

• If you work in Excel to manipulate data, you can’t get all the data out in one dump; you’ll need to dump multiple reports and marry them together in a spreadsheet
• You can’t easily see AdGroup level data here; however,  you can get it by using a secondary dimension, then export to Excel, then sort and filter to find what I need, but it’s a bit “clunky”

AdWords Keyword Details Report

First, if you’re a beginner, you might not know where to find this information. It’s not something that is front and center, glaring you in the face. I think it should be, but Google doesn’t right now. You’ll find the keyword detail report here:

You can look at this for all campaigns, a single campaign, or a single AdGroup within a campaign. When you’re diagnosing issues with keywords, and landing page issues, this report, in its most drilled-down format, can be very helpful. You can add 24 different data points to this report. I’m not going to list all 24 here, but what this report doesn’t show is going to be pretty apparent in the “cons” section below

I’m a big fan of the data in the Keyword Details report. It’s much more reliable and realistic than just managing PPCs based on the keywords you’re bidding on. In my opinion, PPC managers should spend a great deal of time deep into this data. The keyword you’ve bid on tells only half the story. Because of the great variety of match types, what your ads actually show up for holds much more weight than what you’re bidding on.

I also like the ability to add up to 24 different data points to one report and then have the ability to dump this all out into an Excel spreadsheet. This is much faster than dumping 3 reports and copying and pasting them together as we do in the Match Search Queries report.

Pros & Cons For AdWords Keyword Details Report

Here are the pros and cons to the Keyword Details Report from my point of view. If you have other pros and cons, please feel free to share with the group in the comments section below!

Pros

• You can find the Keywords that trigger your Product Listing Ads with this report. If you’re running these with a hookup to the Google Merchant Center, you know how difficult that data is to find. Just filter the report for all campaigns down to your Product Listing Ads AdGroup or Campaign.
• You can add up to 24 columns of data to this report and export it all to Excel.  This makes the data much easier to manipulate much more quickly.
• You’re given the keyword that you’ve bid on, with match type, that generated the actual keyword the searcher queried.
• I can see if I have AdGroups or campaigns that are competing for the same term. If I sort the actual query by a single phrase – “Red Widgets,” I can see how many different AdGroups contain keywords I’m bidding on that generate that phrase.
• I can see much more granular AdGroup data here. While AdGroup data is available via a secondary dimension in Analytics, it requires sorting, etc. to get there.

Cons

• Even though you’re able to add 24 different data points to this report, you’re not given the site-specific data in the AdWords report. There’s no bounce rate, average time on site, average page views, etc., available when you’re working solely in AdWords.
• There is no revenue data here. This seems like something that should be there, but it’s not available. I can see the cost, and the number of conversions, and the cost per conversion; but, I cannot see the revenue or the revenue per conversion. Cost per conversion is a figure that needs to be compared to revenue; you’ll have to do this in Excel or build a custom analytics report if you need this data (and you should).
• It’s very hard to apply demographic or geographic filters to any data in AdWords. This is much easier in Analytics using Advanced Custom Filters.

Reports Are Not Interchangeable

While I think these reports are both very valuable, they are not interchangeable. Each offers insights that make them both important. I think if there were a way to dump the data from both reports into one Excel sheet, having all the queries match up – it would be an extremely powerful tool. Right now, I cannot find anyone who has done this any other way than manual entry. If you know of one, I’d be very excited to see it and to share it with the group.

As we traveled through the lifespan of social media marketing to date, we heard and said a bunch of phrases like, “revenue tracking isn’t really possible here” and “your revenue is in the engagement.” A quote that has stuck with me for years is from Lee Odden of Top Rank Marketing. He said at a PubCon about 5 years ago, “You don’t ask the phone company to report on the ROI of your telephone.”

From my perspective, I think Social Media serves multiple purposes in a business plan. It allows an easy and public form of customer service communication. This can be an invaluable asset to a business.

Social Media: Ubiquitous & Measurable

It has become widespread, and almost expected, that a company have a Facebook or Twitter page. Comcast empowers its customer service agents to keep in touch with consumers. Dell works to keep in contact with clients via Twitter and Facebook. Many brands online will give a consumer with an issue a way to contact a person that can help them resolve their problems. Consumers now expect to have this avenue of communication.

Social media is also a format to engage in push or pull marketing. You can push your products and ideas out to many people via very robust targeting options, or pull consumers into you concepts and products based on engagement and explanations within the platform. If we look at it from the 10,000 foot view, social media meets a lot of marketing needs on one platform, something most other platforms can’t boast.

Measuring engagement and revenue has historically been a real pain when it comes to social media campaigns. In the last few years, analytics platforms have done more to make these features available, but it’s still not as simple as revenue tracking from a PPC ad or an organic listing.  There are some custom reports and filters that can make your life easier, and the platforms themselves are developing easier-to-use reporting features as well.

Custom Reports – Revenue

I use a few custom reports that make my life easier in understanding social media’s impact on my clients’ sites. One I found recently takes the Google Analytics Social Report and pulls together goal completion and revenue data for each social network. You can, of course, pull this data from the standard reporting with some clicks and filters, but what I like about the custom report is having it at my fingertips, which I can then easily add to my Analytics dashboard.

I found this on my go-to site CustomReportSharing.com. and it was shared by the amazing Annie Cushing. This report – simply called the “Social Networks Report” – can be installed by clicking on the link and choosing which analytics profile you’re working with. Here are the differences:

Standard Social Networks Report:

Custom Social Networks Report:

Custom Reports – Engagement

Measuring engagement from social media is also an important tool. With some brands and tactics, social media visits can incite a higher bounce rate than a normal organic or PPC click. Understanding that this is happening, and why it is happening is important.

Here’s the crux of the issue – to get Google Analytics to track Social Engagement with more in-depth data, you need to do some fancy coding within your analytics script. This isn’t always within our skillset, or ability – so how do we solve this problem? I built a very simple, but easy to implement custom report that will show engagement data only from social sources. I basically took Avinash Kaushik’s Page Efficiency Analysis Report, revamped it for social networks, and included revenue and adjusted goal completion metrics.

I call this the Social Engagement a la AK Report (click on the link to add it to your Analytics custom reports).

The benefit here is to see the data that matters to me. You can edit this custom report to include the metrics that are most important to you!

Get Onboard With Social Networking

I think it’s time, if you haven’t already embraced it, to get on board with social networking. Many who read this will be pros, but many may not have even started down the road. This is for those who just aren’t sure if it’s worth the time investment. I think it’s past time; social media is not going away.

How deeply you’re involved is directly dependent upon your industry and the demands of your audience, but we’re even seeing healthcare information discovery shift to social media, which is a highly personal and private niche – and it’s moving to embrace social media very quickly. In the new year, take a look at your strategy and use these reports to make adjustments and gather information about how well social media has, and can, work for you.

Generally, a page that can be enlarged can be read on a mobile device. What you run into for the user is a lack of functionality and interaction with the site. Dropdown or slide out navigation is nearly impossible to click on; if you’re using video or Ajax functionality it can be lost or not noticed on a mobile device.

When is it time to consider taking things one step further, you can look to your analytics data for indicators. The data can then tell you if it’s time to move into the mobile realm. Let’s talk about a few reports that can help you decide if mobile should be in your future.

Device Information

Seeing what types of devices are accessing the site is the first step to determining the viability of a mobile strategy.  Take that one step further and determine what behaviors those browsers exhibit on your site.

First, we can easily see the types of mobile browsers and the traffic they send in the Mobile report in Google Analytics. Under “Content”, choose the “Mobile” tab and click on “Devices.”

The data above shows a large amount of access via mobile devices. I would be careful in the classification of an iPad as a mobile device. Most websites that render nicely on an iPhone, are elementary and frustrating on an iPad. Don’t lump the two together.

In actuality, this website received 53% of its traffic from mobile devices in the last 30 days. That alone is a strong indicator that a mobile strategy is needed. If you see smaller percentages of traffic, you may want to dig a bit deeper to see how the user is behaving on your site in a mobile browser.

User Interaction

With In-Page Analytics, we can see behavior based on the mobile segment using a small screen browser. I’ll use my personal site as an example, although I do have a responsive design that delivers a different experience to a mobile browser, we can use it as an example. 

First, navigate to the In-Page analytics section under the Content tab:

Once you’ve landed in the correct section, you’ll need to narrow data down to just mobile browsers. Use the Advanced Settings tab to accomplish this:

Once you have set your advanced segment, you can then adjust the browser view to mimic a mobile browser and the activity within a mobile browser. You’ll need to set the browser view to its lowest setting – and change the orientation to “left.”  This will mimic how your website is viewed in a mobile browser.

Click “Show Bubbles” to see percentages of clicks. This is a toggle. The “Browser Size” is also a toggle button. You will see the visible window in the center, click the gear on the far right and choose “Left” to orient the window on the left side of the page.

You can slide the size of the browser window larger or smaller with the slider bar in the center of the page. Once you’ve got the settings right, it will look like this:

The default here is to show clicks, but you can drop down the left side menu and choose any one of your goals. This will show the % of mobile visitors who achieved a goal that clicked on the links available.

If a conversion is set as a goal, you will also be able to see that data. Now you can compare normal Web users to mobile users and the likelihood of a conversion from each. If you don’t have a mobile version of your site, conversions from mobile are likely pretty low or non-existent.

On my site, you can see without a mobile version most mobile visitors click on the first post, or the home button, or the logo – which will just reload the homepage. Pretty lame. With 53% of my traffic coming from mobile devices, leaving this as a site without a mobile solution would be alienating half of my viewers. Luckily I haven’t done this.

In contrast, the mobile version of my site is much simpler – and friendly to most devices (but not an iPad, I deliver a normal website to tablet computers.)

You can see I have a simplified navigation – reachable by tapping on the icon that looks like 3 horizontal lines. The extra colors are also stripped out to allow for faster loading, as well as an easier to read page. An easy scroll up and down is all that is needed, no need to resize the site at all. This functionality is a product of the WordPress theme I use. An e-commerce site might need something slightly more sophisticated.

There are a variety of ways you can compete in mobile. These days, most designers and marketers advocates of a complete website overhaul that makes a moving from a desktop to mobile site seamless. Responsive design can automatically render your current website’s content in a mobile friendly manner.

Sometimes, a complete overhaul just isn’t in the cards. It might be expensive, logistically very difficult, or you might need to take some steps to show the C-suite that the investment is worth it. If a full overhaul of your website isn’t in the cards, a mobile friendly site can be built on a separate domain or a subdomain. Scripts can be placed that automatically redirect mobile devices into the correct website. Whatever option you choose, good content, calls to action and user experience is vital to success.

If Not Now, When Will It Be Time?

These days – most of the Web is accessed via mobile phones. Email is accessed via a mobile at a rate of 36% and growing according to a Knotice study from earlier this year. Making calls is now the 5^th most popular action to take on a mobile phone. The #1 use for a mobile phone is surfing the Internet.

A study from April 2012 listed China as the top country for mobile Web users. Globally, the percentage of pageviews attributed to mobile nearly doubled from 6.5% in October of 2011 to 12.3% in May of 2012.

Can you afford to not have a mobile solution, likely not. These tips were designed to help you convince the skeptics in your organization to give it a try.

Not provided was predicted as having a single-digit impact on sites. In my research, I’ve found it to have upwards of a 40% impact, especially on smaller traffic sites.

In conversations with clients, and looking at my own sites, I knew the numbers had to be better – but what do you tell a client when chunks of data, in some cases over 30%, are attributed to (not provided) instead of the keywords you’ve given time, attention and tears to over the previous months and years.

Honestly the standard, “It’s happening, but Google isn’t showing us what it is” is just not good enough. Its not good enough for me; why would it be good enough for a client?

I was on a mission… to find some way to make this data useful again. My goal? I needed a way to attribute (not provided) data to a page, or a keyword phrase, without tearing my hair out. My first stop was CustomReportSharing.com – it’s definitely a go-to for ready-made reports. I’ve talked before about not reinventing the wheel; well, this is where I started.

Custom Filters

I found a great Custom Filter here that allowed me to see a good chunk of data. With this filter, instead of (not provided) we are allowed to see the page that the (not provided) click landed on. This then gives us an idea of what keyword phrases are driving that traffic. Here’s an example:

From September 7 to October 6, my hobby blog received 5,272 visits from organic search. Of those visits, 1,518 were attributed to (not provided).  I lost nearly 30% of my keyword data. So here is what I saw:

I have implemented the Filter mentioned above on a separate Google Analytics profile.  Any time you’re looking at changing how data is reported with advanced segments and filters, it’s smart to have a profile separate from your main profile, where wonky data reporting wont hinder the true data. If it doesn’t work, you want to be able to undo what you’ve done without permanent adjustments to your tracking.

Luckily, this advanced filter worked, and the not provided data became much clearer. With the Advanced Filter in place, here is what I see for the same report and time period:

In the case of my hobby blog, most of those 1,518 visits were attributable to a single post; this likely will not happen with your site – unless you have one piece of content that drives large amounts of traffic like I do.

You can immediately see the added value in the filtered results. I now know which keyword efforts are driving traffic to my site, when previously the data was buried in (not provided) limbo. I can now use the advanced filtering and exporting to group keywords and landing pages together to see actionable results. I’m working on building a custom report that will do something like this and will share it as soon as I get it figured out.

Setting Up Advanced Filters To Improve Not Provided Results

Setting up a new profile with this advanced filter in place couldn’t be easier. Follow the steps in the link above to set up a new Google Analytics profile for your account.

Here are my tips to make things easier as you set up your new profile:

• Give your new profile a descriptive name – I used “Domain.com – Not Provided” because I created the profile solely to test (not provided) filtering and reporting.
• Anyone who has admin access to your account will see this new profile, so make sure they know you’re testing and making changes.
• Don’t skip this step – you want to be able to easily delete the profile if the data becomes corrupted or your filtering and segmentation doesn’t work

Once you’ve set up the new profile, you can immediately create your advanced filter. Click on the “Filters” Tab and click the “New Filter” button.

You’re going to create a New Custom Filter that looks exactly like this:

When finished, click Save and wait for a while for some data to come in. You’ll start seeing “NP – URLdirectory.com” instead of (not provided) quite quickly.

Custom Report Sharing also featured an advanced segment that just eliminates all (not provided) data from the results. If you’re seeing low single-digit site impact, this might be a good option for you. For me, this piece wasn’t ideal, because such a large amount of data was (not provided), my analysis could have been handicapped without it.

I did some more searching and found a couple of approaches I didn’t try – they didn’t seem to provide any better results than what I had from my examples. If you’d like to try them – check it out.

• Yet Another Way to Reclaim Your (not provided) data – State of Search
• Overcoming (not provided) using Webmaster Tools – Blueglass.com
• Smarter Data Analysis of Google’s Https (not provided) Change – 5 Steps – Avinash Kaushik

Note: If you think of data and Analytics as a hobby, and you’re not reading Avinash Kaushik’s blog, you’re missing out. I read his posts 3 or 4 times just to try and glean as many nuggets as I can. 

These tips are designed to help you SEE the data, which then makes it actionable. I say it a lot, and I’ll say it again here, if you’re just looking at data, and not making action plans based on what you see, you’re wasting your time. Data is just words and numbers on a page, analysis and plan derivation from those data points is what makes reviewing your Analytics profitable.

Give this a try and see if you can get a better picture of how your site is performing organically. If you have another way to help you see (not provided) data, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

See also our related article on Marketing Land today: Dark Google: One Year Since Search Terms Went “Not Provided”