That’s their expectation. The reality is AdWords for even a moderate budget could really be a full-time, 40-hour-per-week job. There are many intricacies in an AdWords account, and it’s becoming more complicated by the day. Analytics plays a vital role in deciding how to spend your money effectively.

Buying a number one ad position in Google can bankrupt even the heftiest of budgets, and honestly, do you need that number one position to make more money?  Could number 4 make you more, or just as much, for a much reduced investment?  Once you determine the best position for your keywords, how do you make sure they stay there?

In this article, we’ll show you how to find the most profitable positions, and how to create automated rules in AdWords to ensure your keywords show ads in the most desirable places on the search results pages.

Now we can see in which positions our keywords become the most profitable – profitable – not necessarily the highest earners. I can spend $10,000 on a number one position for 30 days, and make $20,000. I made a 100% return on my investment. If I buy the same keyword into the number 4-6 positions, spend $5,000 for 30-days, and receive that same $20,000 in revenue – I just increased my ROI to 300%.

Here’s how to see the best position for the investment in Analytics.

First select “Advertising” from the sidebar menu.  Then choose “AdWords” and “Keyword Positions” from that sub-menu.

From this report view, you can see how many AdWords visits your keywords received, and the Site Usage for each of those keywords. This can help you determine which positions and keywords provide the lowest bounce rate, longest time on site, etc.

If you don’t track revenue with your AdWords account, this is still extremely important information to have.

If you do track revenue, you can take this report one step further. You can see how much revenue you generated per keyword, by position. This is really important when evaluating the necessity of a number one ranking.

First choose “Ecommerce” just below the Explorer tab above the graph:

Then choose “Revenue” from the dropdowns. You can do one or both here; it is good to see position performance for the keywords that make the most money and for the keywords that get the most visits.

In the example above, you can see that the keyword “Pink Widgets” made the most money in the 8^th position in the sidebar. This is odd, but it’s not unusual. You’ll see results like this all the time.

Here’s another example where position 3 at the top brought in 5x the revenue that position 1, 2, or 4.

So what do we learn? We now know that position one, for these keywords, is not necessarily the top converting position. The formula you use to determine ROI for any given position is:

I can now adjust my CPC bid for this keyword and use an automated rule to increase or reduce my budget to keep me in a particular position. Previously, we used the “Position Preference” feature, but that was retired last year…so we now create rules to handle positioning of keywords.

To create an automated rule, choose the keyword(s) in your AdWords account and pick “Automate” and then “Change max. CPC bids when” from the drop down menu:

From here, you set the position and bid where you think they need to be.  You’ll need to set a rule to raise the bid when the “Avg. position worse than” is triggered, and a separate rule for “Avg. position better than.”

This is definitely something that needs to be monitored and tweaked until it’s working perfectly. I strongly recommend setting a max bid for each click so the rule cannot keep escalating the bid without a limit.  I also think the Frequency setting will take a bit of work.

You can set 2 or 3 rules and apply them to multiple keywords at once, or pick them from the list of existing rules, so once your rules are set up – adding them across the account becomes much easier.

The “Automated rules” section of AdWords will list all of your rules and let you tweak them, and see when rules ran on particular keywords or ads. Be sure you read and understand how rules work before you start. I recommend the Automated Rules best practices document from Google.

TIP: Take a look at your “Matched Search Queries” report and compare it to your Keyword Report in analytics.  Avinash Kaushik has a great article about how Matched Search Queries are truth, wherein the Keyword Report is “lies.”  This can also help you fine-tune your AdWords bidding process, as well as understand what phrases are actually bringing traffic.

Once you’ve set up your rules, be sure to annotate the change in your analytics account so you can watch and see if the ROI from your AdWords account improves over time.

If things aren’t going well, tweak your bid or your position until they improve. This technique will definitely take time, but it can offer huge returns when done correctly. This is just one more reason your AdWords account should not be an afterthought in your entire online marketing strategy.

“These reports provide another layer of social insight showing which of your content attracts links, and enables you to keep track of conversations across other sites that link to your content. Most website and blog owners had no easy mechanism to do this in the past, but we see it as another important feature for holistic social media reports. When you know what your most linked content is, it is then also much easier to replicate the success and ensure that you are building relationships with those users who actively link to you the most.”

Where To Find The Backlink URLs Report

The Backlink information is not easy to find. First visit the pages tab on the Social reports (this link should take you directly to this report). Then click on a specific URL. Here is what you will see now:

As indicated in the screenshot above, click on the Activity Stream tab above the graphs. Then you will arrive at another page that gathers all Social Data Hub conversations related to this specific page, as seen below:

If you click the Events tab shown above you will find the Backlinks information. This information appears among all other social events like +1s, Delicious bookmarks, and others. For each backlink URL you will be able to View Activity, i.e. visit the page with link, or to View Page, i.e. view the page linked.

As you will see in the reports, while this information is very useful, it is still lacking a centralized place where users can see all the linked pages aggregated. The way this information is being organized is very focused on Social Media professionals, it treats links as another event related to the post. And the reports do not allow any filtering or segmentation. If we look at the Webmaster Tools (screenshot below), the information is more focused on SEOs, showing in a glance where the links are coming from and to which pages.

Postscript 1: According to a comment by Ilya Grigorik on a Google+ post, there is a way to find the centralized information in the reports, here is his explanation on how to do it.

I should also point out that there is indeed a way for users to see all of the linked pages aggregated, though it requires some GA ninja tricks at the moment. We’re working on making it more intuitive for users. Here it is:

1. Just as you outlined in the post, navigate to “Pages”, select a URL, click on “Activity Stream” – this shows you the activitystream for just that URL
2. Ninja trick #1: At the top of the page where it shows the breadcrumb with the current page, click on “ALL” – this report will show you all activity across all the pages in chronological order.
3. Ninja trick #2: Scroll down to any trackback activity and click on the (green) trackback icon: this filters the activitystream to just trackbacks.. And voila, you see a list of most recent trackbacks across all of your pages.

Social Signals And Backlinks In The Same Bucket

This addition is interesting in that Google decided to add this information to the Social reports instead of adding it to the SEO reports. This decision makes sense from a Google Analytics perspective as this information, like all other Social information, is a factor that happens outside the website and, as such, it could be analyzed in the same way we analyze Google+ activity.

However, this information is more often used by SEOs in order to optimize pages and understand which pages are getting the most links. As discussed above, it appears that these reports are more focused on Social Media professionals rather than SEO professionals.

It is also interesting to look at this in the light of Danny Sullivan’s post discussing Social signals for Google and Bing, this decision shows how backlinks and social signals are seen as part of the same bucket.

The Poynter Institute, a non-profit journalism school that’s well known in media circles, wrote Wednesday about the growing impact that (not provided) is having on publisher websites. Author Steve Myers shared what he found after checking Poynter.org’s analytics:

Keywords were hidden in 29 percent of searches in April. That’s up from 22.5 percent in November, shortly after the change was made. Now “(not provided)” makes up the largest category of search terms, dwarfing the second place term: Poynter. Overall, 6 percent of inbound traffic now comes from a black box.

In the six-plus months since Google began encrypting searches and outbound clicks by default for logged-in users on Google.com, (not provided) keyword referrals have grown well beyond the single-digit searches that Google originally said would be affected.

The conventional wisdom has been that it’s a problem that mostly affects SEO- and search industry-related websites — sites that get a lot of traffic from Google via users that are logged in due to using Google Analytics, Gmail, Google AdWords and any number of other Google products that require a login. At the start of the year, though, I shared a few examples of non-tech/non-search sites that were already seeing (not provided) as one of their Top 10 referring keywords only two-and-a-half-months after Google made the change.

With Firefox moving to secure search by default and Google announcing in March that secure search would expand beyond the U.S., it’s nearly certain that (not provided) will become more common and affect more websites well beyond the search and tech industries.

We could do the same again right now, because Google has tried to top itself with another round of April Fool’s Day jokes that pretty well span the globe of Google’s international properties. Below is a recap of Google’s (and a few others) pranks, and we’ll do our best to update this as the day goes along.

Google Racing: Self-Driving Cars Hit NASCAR

The main joke at the moment is Google’s “announcement” of a partnership with NASCAR called Google Racing, which brings Google’s self-driving cars to NASCAR race tracks “by the middle of next season.”

There’s also a faux news video about Google Racing (with no embed code – the cruelest joke of all!) starring Jeff Gordon and a couple other NASCAR drivers, not to mention Sergey Brin pretending to be Google’s first NASCAR driver … or whatever you call the person who doesn’t actually drive the car.

And if you go to Google.com, the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button has been renamed “I’m Steering Lucky” and there’s a link to the Google Racing microsite.

Google Maps In 8-Bit For NES

Google’s pranks began early this morning with a blog post announcing that Google Japan has created an 8-bit version of Google Maps for the original Nintendo Entertainment System.

You can relive all your favorite 1980s graphics by clicking the “Quest” button in the upper right corner on maps.google.com.

Google Street Roo

In Australia, where Google Street View cars and trikes can’t get to remote areas of the continent, Google says it’ll use kangaroos with mini-cameras mounted on their noggins to photograph the Australian outback. They’re calling it Google Street Roo. Hopefully the 1,000-plus kangaroos won’t mistakenly collect any personal data via wifi while they’re hopping across Australia.

Google China: Underwater Search

I said it was worldwide, right? Well, even Google China has gotten in the act with an underwater search gag. It’s more like a Google doodle than a prank, though.

Google’s Really Advanced Search

Speaking of search, this one will probably go over well with our audience. Google’s really advanced search page has some pretty funny options, like this:

You can also narrow your results based on what font the page uses, what textured background the page has and which “embarrassing grammatical faux pas” is found on the page. If you’re into SEO, you’ll like this one. You may even find yourself wishing that the page actually worked.

Google Search: Weather Control

Another search gag: Google Weather Control. Type in any weather-related search (like “seattle weather”) and you can make the weather anything you want it to be. You can turn Seattle into Phoenix, if you’d like.

Google AdWords: Click-to-Teleport

The AdWords team has a new extension called Click-to-Teleport that lets “potential customers to instantly teleport to your business location directly from a search ad.”

The YouTube Collection

YouTube’s annual April Fool’s Day prank is the YouTube Collection — all of YouTube on DVD. Once you order, 175 trucks will deliver the DVDs right to your door. Oh, just watch the video. Make your checks payable to “Matt McGee” if you’re planning to order.

Play Music In Google Analytics

I’m not seeing this (yet?) in my Google Analytics account, but this Aussie blog says there’s a little music icon on the Visitors Overview page in Google Analytics. You can play a piano or sitar while enjoying (or bemoaning) your website’s performance.

Google Chrome Multitask Mode

The Google Chrome team thinks one mouse/hand isn’t enough for web browsing, so they’ve launched Multitask Mode — two mice/hands at once.

Gmail Tap

Gmail Tap converts your keyboard from 26 letters to just two — dots and dashes, just like Morse code.

Google Fiber Bar

Forget that fiber optic network thing. Google Fiber is actually just a fiber-filled candy bar that helps you be up to 100 times more productive than ever before.

That’s Not All…

There are other search-related April Fool’s Day gags, perhaps my favorite of which is Google Nigeria, which jokingly asks you to input your bank account number so you can “search for inheritance.”

Don’t be alarmed: the search box just runs a normal Google search (not that you’d actually put your bank account number in there, anyway, right?) and, while this is NOT an official Google gag, it also doesn’t appear to be run by some Nigerian prince. (It’s a production from 85by55.com.)

There’s also TheGoogleButton.com, which lets you make a fake Google search result page with whatever website (and title/snippet) you want in the No. 1 spot.

Flickr has announced that all photos can now be seen in the 1980s style “Atkinson dither,” accessible via a small button in the lower right part of any photo page.

And last, and probably not least, the folks at Reddit announced “reddit timeline,” which brings a touch of Facebook to the proceedings and is pretty funny — especially when you click on “1970s” and get the animated rainbow header, along with “news” about Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and the war in Vietnam.

And now that April Fool’s Day has actually begun … time to sign-off, at least until the next prank comes along.

Postscript:

As expected, we have a few more pranks to add and they all come from Google. Here you go!

GoRo: Google Mobile

Google Mobile has introduced a program called GoRo — the name is a play on the actual “Go Mo” campaign — that encouraged business owners to learn how to optimize their websites for rotary phones. Why? Because “technology is cyclical.”

Google Analytics: Interplanetary Reporting

Google Analytics jokingly wrote about a sneak preview of “interplanetary reports” that let website owners “understand visitor activities from neighboring stars and planets.”

Interplanetary reports will be rolled out in 2030, Google says, “when we anticipate local space travel becomes widespread.” Heh. Watch them be right about that part.

Google AdWords: Planetary Targeting

The AdWords folks didn’t stop just with Click-to-Teleport (see above). Oh no, there’s more. If you login to your AdWords account and edit location settings on one of your campaigns, you’ll see a joke about being able to do planetary targeting.

And yes, if you follow through and type “Mars,” for examplem, it shows up as one of the targeting options. There’s even a fake support page explaining how it all “works.”

At least I think it’s fake. Who can tell anymore?

The change was posted on the Google Webmaster Central blog yesterday, and it took some follow up to really understand what’s happening. Come along, and I’ll explain more.

Google & Blocking Referrers

Referrers are sort of a Caller ID for web browsers. They tell a web site where someone came from. For example, if you click on a link from one page to visit the next, the page you were on is passed along as referrer information that can be seen using web analytics tools. Sometimes this is also called “referer” information, due to a long-ago misspelling around the referrer standard. “Referral” is also sometimes used.

Last October, Google began blocking referrer information from being passed along by those searching on its search engine, if they were signed-in and using a secure connection.

Google said the change was made to better protect privacy. It turned out to be a precursor to preventing “eavesdropping” of especially private searches that might happen as part of Search Plus Your World.

However, despite saying the move was to protect privacy, Google went out of its way to continue passing along referrer data to paid advertisers. Other loopholes also remain. The move is incredibly hypocritical. See the articles at the end of this story to understand more about the blocking and the hypocrisy in greater depth

If Google is already withholding search term data for signed-in users, then what else could it really pull back? How about reporting even if a search happened.

Beginning in April, Google’s going to begin using the referrer meta tag to report what it calls a “simplified” referrer. The tag will let it override the real referrer that would go out, even what’s left of that referrer after search terms have been stripped.

How The Referrer Meta Tag Turns Searches Into Referrals

Consider a search for “hotels.” If you do that search and click on one of the top listings, say for Travelocity, the actual URL you’re going to looks like this:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=hotels&source=web&cd=1 &ved=0CJABEBYwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.travelocity.com%2FHotels &ei=EftoT6eRLaKxiQK5uYGSBw&usg=AFQjCNHw3v58SOrf2HWCsE6AraxFouCmJQ

The URL doesn’t lead directly to the site. Instead, it redirects through Google itself, in a way that Google can record what’s in the URL to better track the click.

I’ve bolded how Google embeds in the URL information that someone searched for the word “hotels” and clicked on the first listing in the results, which in turn took them to the page at Travelocity, also shown in bold.

If this search is done when someone is signed-in using a secure connection, Google drops the search term portion. It basically looks like this:

http://www.google.com/url?q=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.travelocity.com%2FHotels

An analytics program can tell that a search happened by seeing the “q=” part in the URL, but the actual term itself has been stripped out by Google. So while Google Analytics can’t report what the search words were (and thus says “not provided”), it still can tell that a search happened.

The new change takes out everything but the start of the referrer. Do a search on Google.com using Chrome, and this is all that will be reported:

https://google.com

Because there’s no indicator that a search happened, an analytics program may interpret that people have come from a link on Google.com rather than doing a search there. This means that search traffic would mistakenly get recorded as what’s called “referral” traffic.

Search Traffic Vs. Referral Traffic

To understand better, here’s my traffic breakdown to my personal blog Daggle from yesterday. This is from Google Analytics:

You see that 76% of my traffic was from search, people who did some type of recognized search and visited my site. Google Analytics doesn’t know the actual search terms for nearly a third of these visits (yeah, wow, right?). See how “not provided” makes up 35% of all keywords in the lower chart? But Google Analytics still knows that they were searches, so they get counted into the overall search total.

After that, about 14% of traffic is from referrals, people who clicked on a link from one site that lead to my own. Another 10% of traffic is direct, people who either directly entered the URL of one of my pages into their web browser or who came to my site without any referrer information being reported (which isn’t necessarily direct traffic, but it gets counted that way).

With the change, Google Analytics or other analytics program would count some of my search visits as if they are referral visits, unless they adjusts for this. The slice of search traffic would start to drop, even though my search traffic could potentially be going up.

Google Analytics Will Adjust, Other Vendors Being Told

If you use Google Analytics, Google says there’s no reason to panic. Google Analytics is supposed to figure out how to count things correctly. The same may be true for other vendors, by the time this happens. Google told us:

We’re using the meta referrer standard which allows us to choose the origin and still send a referrer to http sites from https search results (without going through a redirect on an http host).

Google Analytics will also adjust for this change, and we’re in the process of reaching out to a number of other analytics vendors to notify them about this in advance.

Only Impacts Chrome & Really A Time Saver?

The change will only happen for those using Google Chrome, as that’s the only browser that supports the meta referrer tag, Google told us. As for why bother doing this at all, the blog post says:

This results in a faster time to result and more streamlined experience for the user.

I’m a bit doubtful about the savings. It’s not like Google is stopping the actual click tracking that it does. Everything you click on still gets redirected, which causes a tiny delay. The meta referrer tag only means that those using the Chrome browser will pass along a shorter URL for where they came from.

Surely that’s not saving much time? I asked Google how much this really speeds things up:

We don’t have data to share right now. However, this does allow the user’s browser to avoid making an extra connection to http://www.google.com (which the browser may not have already established since the search was on https://www.google.com/).

I’m still confused about why the browser would make an extra connection back to Google after someone has left, because of anything to do with passing along referrer data. I’ll check on that.

Pleading Again For More Data In Google Webmaster Central

Overall, there’s probably no reason to panic, if you use a major analytics provider. But it’s something you should check on. It’s also an unpleasant reminder that Google keeps messing with the referrer data that it provides to publishers in a way that messes up their trending.

Google’s answer to all these changes is that people should make use of Google Webmaster Central to pull in missing search data. But that data only goes back 30 days. That does nothing to restore the trends that have been destroyed since withholding began.

I’ll repeat what I said earlier this year about all this:

I think Google should do more than 60 days. I think it should be providing continuous reporting and holding that data historically on behalf of sites, if it’s going to block referrers. Google is already destroying historical benchmarks that publishers have maintained. Google’s already allowed data to be lost for those publishers, because they didn’t begin to go in each day and download the latest information.

So far, all Google’s done is provide an Python script to make downloading easier. That’s not enough. Google should provide historical data, covering a big chunk of the terms that a site receives. It’s the right thing to do, and it should have been done already.

See the articles below for further background about the blocking:

• Google To Begin Encrypting Searches & Outbound Clicks By Default With SSL Search
• Google Puts A Price On Privacy
• Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World”
• 2011: The Year Google & Bing Took Away From SEOs & Publishers

Right now, my client load consists of about 19 different domains that all have their own analytics installs. Each week that’s a lot of information to check, verify, monitor, and create an action plan from. Without my dashboards, and most importantly, my consistently formatted dashboards, I would spend hours finding information – now I have it all at the tip of my fingers.

Formatting dashboards across multiple installations used to be a pain. I’d have to open one client’s dashboard, then add widgets to another client’s dashboard one by one and arrange them in the order I prefer to see them. This was definitely a tedious and time consuming task.

Then I saw something magical in my dashboard one day – a simple little link. I knew I had just gained yet another chunk of time with which I can spend to make my clients’ money, as opposed to looking for data. I’m not sure how long this link has been there, so many changes have been happening in Google Analytics lately, who knows when it first appeared. Now that I see it, I just had to share, because it’s something that is going to make your life so much easier, I promise.

Before we talk about the magic, let’s talk about KPIs. What should you be looking at on a daily or weekly basis?

To be honest, that really depends on what is important to you. As I’ve shared before, all of my clients are in hospitality, and 99% of them are lodging hospitality of some sort, so the KPIs I monitor on a daily or weekly basis are similar for the most part.

Here is a list of the KPIs I look at and the order in which I have them set up in my analytics dashboard.

• Revenue
• Bounce Rate
• Referrers
• Transactions
• Visits
• Organic Visits
• Paid Keywords
• Landing Page
• Unique Events (this is a click on a call to action – generally a “Book Now” type action)

Because I stay organized, and I keep every widget in the same spot, for every client’s dashboard, I can efficiently find information. An unexpected client call doesn’t leave me with uncomfortable silences while I log in and dig through links to find data; I have it all at the tip of my fingers.

I promised you magic, so here it is. Now within your Google Analytics dashboard, you can click “Share Dashboard” – and magically you’re provided with a link you can paste into a browser while logged into another account, and it will create your dashboard with the new client’s data pulled in.

Here’s How It Works

Have your dashboard set up the way you’d like it in one account. At the top of the “Home” page click on “Share Dashboard.”

You’ll be given a link – copy it somewhere safe for the next few minutes.

Now, login to your next client’s Google Analtyics account. (See the quick tip below for details on how to make this easier.)

Go to their profile and simply paste the URL into the browser. You’ll be asked which profile you want to add the dashboard to:

Once you choose your profile from the drop down menu, give you dashboard its name – you may want to set up a different dashboard for your client, they might like to see different data than you do. Click “Create Dashboard”.

Your dashboard will appear, in the order you want it, with the new profile’s data populated for your convenience.

Quick Tip for Beginners who review multiple accounts:

Set up a Google account and make it an administrator for all of your client’s analytics accounts. Do not create new profiles with your own Google account, you want the client to own their own data, so make sure you’re in their account when you set up new profiles and installations. By adding yourself to their account with administrative access, you can access every Google Analytics profile with one username and password.

If you and your client decide to go separate ways, they own their data, and can disable your access. If a new client comes on board, they can add you easily enough to their existing installation. Personally, I think it is 100% shady when an agency says they own your GA data because it’s in their dashboard and “can’t” give you the account. Yes, I’ve seen it happen more than once.

Helpful tips like those I’ve given you above are invaluable to making your work life more efficient and less tedious. If your day depends upon pockets of time, this technique will give you more of those pockets and less headaches.

As always, I’m very interested in any time-saving analytics tips you might have – please share them in the comments below – I know I’m not the only one looking for more time in my already hectic day!

Every once in a while, the Google Analytics team updates the list to reflect new or more popular search engines. We have confirmed that, starting from February 1st, a few search engines have been added to the list mentioned above. Below is the list of new search engines that are now part of the default list:

• http://rakuten.co.jp
• http://biglobe.ne.jp
• http://goo.ne.jp
• http://www.startsiden.no/sok

Change In The Way Google Analytics Recognizes Search Engines

In addition to the update above, Google has also fixed a long-running issue with the way search engines are recognized.

Before this change, if a URL contained the word “search” and a query parameter “q”, Google would attribute it to the search engine search.com, which led to inaccurate reports, especially as a consequence of big customized search engines, such as Conduit, Babylon and others.

Below we can see the Google Analytics organic data for a large website, and it is clear that search.com is heavily over counted.

As of February 1st, this logic has been changed, in a way that customized search engines (as the ones shown in the list below) will not be shown as search.com.

The Google Analytics team are also explicitly adding known large customized search engines with “search” in them to their default list of known search engines:

• http://search.conduit.com
• http://search.babylon.com
• http://search-results.com
• http://isearch.avg.com
• http://search.comcast.net
• http://search.incredimail.com

How Does It Affect Your Data?

The new definition will take the average of the top ranking of your site for all searchers, as opposed to all URLs listed and average that. In the past, they would take all the positions of your rankings and average them together, now they are taking only the top positions.

Here is how Google explains it:

Let’s say Nick searched for [bacon] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 3, 6, and 12. Jane also searched for [bacon] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 5 and 9. Previously, we would have averaged all these positions together and shown an Average Position of 7. Going forward, we’ll only average the highest position your site appeared in for each search (3 for Nick’s search and 5 for Jane’s search), for an Average Position of 4.

Historically, this won’t impact the reports but going forward, Google will use this new calculation for determining your average position.

Google said, “we anticipate that this new method of calculation will more accurately match your expectations about how a link’s position in Google Search results should be reported.”

Here is where the average position shows up in Google Webmaster Tools:

Here is where the average position shows up in Google Analytics:

Related Stories:

• Google Analytics Webmaster Tools SEO Reports Now Available
• Google Analytics To Add Search Query Data From Webmaster Tools
• Keyword “Not Provided” By Google Spikes, Now 7-14% In Cases
• Google Webmaster Tools Search Queries Report Now Less Accurate
• Google Webmaster Tools Adds Useful Download Options

Those not “in the know” about the truly trackable benefits of online marketing are generally skeptical at best when told “I can show you where every penny went, and what we got back in return.”

The inability to track return on radio, tv or even print ad buys without extensive (and frankly pretty difficult) work and integration between multiple departments makes these less than desireable mediums in my mind, but to someone who has used those outlets for 20 years or more, getting them to divert, or continue to divert, dollars into “this Internet thing” is not easy.

Here are some tips for those fairly new to using analytics on how to justify your job, and your budget. The snaps below are cobbled together and taken from a variety of clients, but the visuals have not been changed, so don’t read too much into the actual numbers. We’re showing this to give you an idea of how to find and read the data.

First, you MUST set up conversion tracking. If that conversion isn’t an online purchase, it has to be something else. Whether it’s a click-through to another site, or a form submission, there are ways to track how many of those you receive.

Check into this post on Event Tracking, or this one on Goal Tracking. If you don’t track dollars through your site, you might know what each form submission or newsletter sign up means to your company dollar-wise. You can set those goal values when you set up Goal Tracking, which will make the following reports easier to understand in terms of return on investment.

After your conversion tracking is set up, take a look at your Multi-Channel-Funnels reports. This is where a good amount of insight is going to come into how ad dollars move people into your conversion funnels.

Once you’re in the right spot, you’re going to see the relation between how someone finds your site, and when they purchase.  You’re going to see a variety of paths here, most “buyers” visit a site multiple times, and get there via multiple paths.

Multi Channel Funnels – Top Conversion Paths – All Traffic

You can see above, that Referrals and Paid Advertising have a huge impact on conversions, where Direct access conversions are, in all cases, supported by a paid advertising or referral click.

When looking at this report – be sure you sort so you are looking at the top Conversions or Conversion Values first.  The report defaults to sort by Conversion – but these conversions relate to goals not to purchases – so 30 goal conversions may equal $2658.70, but for this particular site (high dollar vacation travel), that’s only one purchase.

Multi Channel Funnels – Top Conversion Paths – AdWords

Running an adwords campaign, and justifying spend on top-dollar keywords is helped by scrolling to the top of your Top Conversion Paths report and clicking “AdWords” instead of “All.”

Now you’re going to add a secondary dimension within the report:

Once you’ve done this – you’re going to see which adgroups and keywords are leading to the most conversions, be those conversions “goals” or “dollars”

My one “gripe” about this report is the “unavailable” isn’t defined. I am guessing that this means there were some “non-Adwords” steps within the conversion path, and those aren’t shown or show as “unavailable”

This report is a big help when showing your c-suite how every aspect of search marketing works together to boost conversions.

Traffic Source E-commerce Report

Once your ecommerce tracking is set up – you can see what each referral means for your bottom line. Some online ad placements are expensive, and it’s important to see how those investments return money back to your business.

Here’s a report that will help you see return and justify your investment decisions.

Once you’re in the All Traffic Traffic Source report, click on the E-commerce tab:

Within this report – you’ll be able to sort by conversions and Revenue and see the referrers that send you dollars over any given period of time.

The data above would justify a few things in my mind. First, we make more money on PPC clicks than organic clicks, so we should keep our PPC budget, but work towards better organic rankings.

It also justifies the Ad placement on Frommers.com, and my email marketing blast sent at least $1949.91 in revenue.  Generally – any “mail.” type of source is the result of someone emailing someone else a link, or your email marketing.

You can match this data with a “Campaign” report for your email marketing to double check that result.

Traffic Source Campaign Ecommerce Report

If you’re buying and placing ads, you should be able to dictate the landing page URL for each placement. Outside of Google Properties (AdWords, Express, etc) you need to set up Campaign tracking for each buy to be sure your spend is justified in return revenue.

Use the Google URL Builder to build a landing page URL that will automatically create a campaign for you to track in your analytics.

To see how campaigns work – once you’ve set up your URLs at your referring sites, click on Campaigns under Traffic Sources.

Then choose Ecommerce at the top of the page again.

Now you’re going to see all of your campaigns across Google and outside networks –and how much revenue they returned.

In this instance – some of the email marketing we did over the holidays had a nice return and is definitely justified

In the end, doing a lot of great work and achieving great visibility for your site might just not be enough. We’ve all had those bosses or clients who don’t understand bounce rates and average time on site, and only looked at dollar signs.

The reports above will help you prove the work you’re already doing is having a positive impact on the bottom line.

In my last article,we talked about the basic reports you should watch as a beginner. This week, we’re going to work on how to make Google Analytics work for you via Goal setup and configuration.

The first thing you need to do after login is find where to setup goals, which is not where you see the goal results. In reality, most of the setup in Google Analytics happens behind the sprocket in the upper right hand corner:

Once you’re in the right spot, you’ll see the “Goals” tab below where you choose the profile.

A note of caution, you’re allowed 5 sets of goals with 5 goals in each set. You don’t get to delete a goal and set something new up – so be choosy about what you put in here.

I’m going to show you a way to set up goals that will allow you to see a lot of information for one goal, so it’s not necessary to get extremely granular in your setup, to begin with anyway.

Before I start my setup, I boil down the ultimate “goal” of my pages. In e-commerce, these are generally 3 things:

• Did the visitor search for something?
• Did they add it to their cart?
• Did they buy it?

As I work in travel –  a “shopping cart” is not really used, but there is valuable information to be found in how a user navigates your site through a date search, or as we call it “quick search.” My first goal is going to be an inquiry into how many people complete a quick search. Then, we’ll set up a goal for conversions.

First, name your goal something recognizable, so you know immediately what the end result of this Goal should be. I used “complete quick search.”

Next, set the goal to “Active” and give it a goal type. I use URL Destination. Although you can use Time on Site, Pages per Visit, and Event – those setups are a tad advanced and best left for another day.

Under “Goal Details”, enter the ultimate URL you want your visitors to hit in this goal funnel. I used the URL given when a quick search is completed. If you use session IDs and parameters in your URLS, you may need to use wildcards to see the goal. More on setting those up in the Google Analytics Help for Match Types.

If your URLs are case sensitive, check that box, and if you don’t run e-commerce, but are a lead generation site, you can set a value for every user that completes the goal. I don’t recommend this to start with, your numbers will be a tad wonky and confusing.

You then want to set the funnel for reaching your goal – so you check that box and you’ll see the boxes for the funnel to appear. This is where you copy in the steps a user could  take to reach the goal. I recommend setting this up fairly simply – homepage, content page or two, goal page.

You’ll still see every entrance and execution of that goal as long as you don’t check the “Required Step” box!

Once you’re happy with the goal – click save and watch for results.

Because we didn’t click “required step” when entering our funnel urls, you’ll be able to see entrances and exits from your goal funnel that don’t follow your prescribed entry.

If you don’t have a “thank you” page to track, and this does happen via fancy JavaScript booking processes and the link, then you can set up virtual pages that will help you track reservations. That is a tad more advanced, so if you’re not technical, find a good consultant to help you with it. If you want to give it a try on your own, here are the Google Analytics instructions for virtual pages.

Seeing how users are interacting with your buying process is the key to fixing issues, making your guests more efficient in their choice, and finding room for improvement. Following these simple setup steps can get you a long way towards finding out more about your website, your buying cycle, and your selling process.