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.

Up till now, the landing pages report was very limited, having only three metrics available on the report:

• Entrances: the absolute number of visits landing on this page
• Bounces:the absolute number of visits that bounced when landing on this page
• Bounce Rate: the percentage of bounces from entrances in this page

This is all we got. We could not drill down into landing page performance even when it came to simple actions like understanding time on page (for non-bounces), not to mention goal conversion and ecommerce transactions that were completed during a visit that was initiated on this page (there were some work arounds, but they required many clicks). As of this week we see the following on the same report:

As we can see in the screenshot above, we now have other metrics available in this report, such as Pages/Visit, Avg. Time on Site and % New Visits. This would already be a great improvement, as it allows us to instantly see engagement metrics for visits started from a specific landing page. However, if we look at the top of the pages, we see that, besides site usage, we can now view this report by goals and ecommerce. This means that we can now have an instant picture of landing page performance from this report.

This knowledge is very important in order to understand where to focus the optimization efforts. Once the landing pages can be analyzed, we are more free to segment landing pages, in a way that each audience receives the most matching landing page.

Conceptually none of this is entirely new. There are a range of “analog” companies and methods that measure retail foot traffic. However Euclid tries to bring online analytics’ sophistication to offline locations with smartphone tracking.

Offline Tracking with Smartphones

At least since 2008 people have been talking about using smartphones to track retail foot traffic patterns. And many companies are now trying to connect online and offline behavior with smartphones in various ways (e.g., check-ins, digital coupon redemptions).

Each physical venue or store location using Euclid installs a sensor that tracks people with smartphones entering the store. The company then provides a familiar type of dashboard, showing the various metrics it’s tracking. And yes, not everyone has a smartphone. But while smartphones are still not in the majority (43%), they will be in short order.

Euclid doesn’t track individual users. They see and deliver data in the aggregate.

Online to Offline: There’s a Larger Story

Euclid may or may not gain traction. But what Euclid represents is more important: a larger movement to connect online ads or promotions and offline behavior.

The venerable paper coupon or traditional call tracking have been the two primary methods historically used to measure the efficacy of advertising on in-store sales or ads-to-store behavior. More recently call tracking has been expanded to online advertising and digital coupons redemptions or check-ins (to a lesser degree) are starting to provide more visibility into the impact of online promotions on offline sales.

As another example of the online-to-offline tracking trend, search and social marketing platform provider Kenshoo is now monitoring Facebook and Foursquare check-ins (via APIs) to see if particular search or social ads produced in-store lift. The methodology isn’t connected to keywords but at some point you’ll probably be able to track paid-search keywords to in-store conversions.

Big Changes Coming with New Data

Credit card issuers and point-of-sale vendors are also starting to measure in-store conversions and tie those back to online promotions. There are some scary plans around credit card purchase tracking and the sale of personal data. And mobile payments/wallets will also eventually yield this “closed loop” data too — with varying degrees of anonymity.

Indeed, privacy will have to be negotiated in all these scenarios; and some of the “more aggressive” ones will probably need to be restrained by legislation. However the Euclid solution doesn’t fall into that privacy danger zone because it’s anonymous and aggregated.

The larger point is that within three years, lets say, the in-store success of online and mobile advertising will be much more visible than it is today. Indeed, the “offline” data becoming available to digital marketers via smartphones, credit-card matching and POS data is going to dramatically alter online marketing.

Last week, the Analytics team announced an official integration with social sharing services ShareThis and AddThis. According to their blog post:

To enable the integration for all of your AddThis buttons, you are now just one line of code away, and ShareThis users don’t have to do a thing. If you have Google Analytics installed, and you are using a ShareThis widget, simply login into Google Analytics and check out your new social reports!

While this is great news for many website owners, which can get the social analytics without getting into code implementation, there are still a few issues with these integrations. First, one of the characteristics of the Social Tracking is that it is not filterable. So, for example, if I have two websites under the same account and I use filters to separate the data, the social data will not be separated; if I have a profile for an agency that manages my PPC account that should include only CPC data (according to the filters), they will see all the social data, unrelated to what kind of filter is applied to the profile.

AddThis gets a +1, since it provides the option to choose to add the social method if their customers want to. ShareThis tracking is automatic, so if I have Analytics users who cannot see social data in my account, ShareThis would not be appropriate, unless it provides in the future an opt out from social analytics.

In addition, as we can see in the screenshot below, some calls are still not clear as to their meaning on ShareThis. We have reached their team for an explanation on what is “ShareThis_follow: Share” and “sharethis: sharethis” which, in Search Engine Land’s social reports, represent 6% of all social actions.

Post Script: According to ShareThis, the meaning of the two unknown calls are:

• ShareThis_follow : Share – This is twitter follow
• sharethis : sharethis – This is from publisher’s own logging.

Blocking Search Queries

Two weeks ago Google announced that it would start encrypting search sessions of anyone signed in to Google.com. In practice, this means that Google stopped passing the organic keywords that referred traffic to websites whenever users are logged in Google and conducting searches.

This change caused strong reactions, both in the web analytics industry (as this means that organic search becomes less trackable) and also in terms of whether Google was protecting privacy fully (since advertisers still receive this information).

Single Digit Impact Predicted

Google predicted that the change would impact 10% or less of searches:

Google software engineer Matt Cutts, who’s been involved with the privacy changes, wouldn’t give an exact figure but told me he estimated even at full roll-out, this would still be in the single-digit percentages of all Google searchers on Google.com.

In fact, the week the changes started rolling out, various reports put the “Not Provided” percentage — which is what those using Google Analytics see if terms are blocked — at around 2% to 3%.

High Single Digit To Above 10% Now Happening

However, as of October 31, we have seen a very significant increase on the Not Provided figure here on Search Engine Land. It’s not just us, either. Looking at data from several websites across industries, we see a range of 7% to 14% of total organic keywords now being blocked.

Below you see how the “Not Provided” figure has suddenly spiked for Search Engine Land:

Below you can see how the percentage of Not Provided for the total organic keywords for November 1st to the site is above 10%, 12.87% in all:

The figure is even more dramatic, however, when you consider it as a percentage of Google-driven keywords. In other words, the 12.87% figure above means that for ALL keywords from ANY search engine to Search Engine Land, 12.87% of them were blocked.

As this blocking is only happening by Google, what’s the percentage of only keyword traffic from Google? That works out to 14.2%.

Of course, one might expect Search Engine Land to have a higher percentage of search-driven traffic than other sites. But as said, we’ve also looked at sites beyond Search Engine Land.

Danny Sullivan’s personal blog, Daggle, had 13.65% of its Google-driven keywords blocked. One non-tech site had 7.1% of its Google-driven queries reporting “Not Provided.” Another non-tech site we know of had 8.83% of all its keywords reporting as “Not Provided.”

We’d love to hear what others are finding — please comment below, if you’d like to share your figures.

Postscript: Conductor posted a few days after our report that it found 6.5% of Google-driven searches from high traffic sites they monitor had keywords blocked.

Rollout Still Happening; Percentage Could Get Higher

The rollout was supposed to take place over the course of several weeks. The process is still happening, and it seems as if it was suddenly enabled for more users on October 31.

Google wouldn’t confirm that, nor say how complete the rollout is at this point. In general, the company said:

As we noted, this change will occur over the next few weeks. Traffic figures will naturally vary depending on a website’s audience. What we provided was an estimate.

If there are significantly more people not yet being included in encrypted search, the percentage of Not Provided queries would likely grow over the coming weeks.

Ultimately, in my opinion, you are the only one who can decide what metrics and reports are important to your business.

Some websites don’t collect money but do send traffic to other sites, or collect subscriptions or email sign-ups as a form of conversion. Some do collect money, but it’s just a small portion of their business; the phone call may really be considered a conversion.

So how do you put it all together and come up with useful data from your Analytics account?

The first thing we need to talk about, before we get into reports, is your Dashboard. Each report you use can be ported into your dashboard, so you can see data at a glance. Please be sure you’re using Analytics 5 or the “New” version.

If the top right of your page says “New Version” and is clickable, you’re looking at the “old version” and should switch right away.

I’ll share with you the top three things I think you should look at as you start through your Analytics journey. Feel free to add to this list in the comments below if there is a report that is especially useful to a beginner.

Visitors

Figuring out how your website is being used, and using that knowledge to make it better, starts with the visitor.

Knowing who is coming to your site, how long they spend on the site and each page, and how many pages they look at before leaving or buying can give valuable insight into improving your subscription or checkout process.

From the Visitor Overview report, you can see a “snapshot” of data for your site over a particular period of time.

I look at about four metrics on this overview report on a regular basis:

• Visits
• Unique visitors
• Pages per visit
• Average time on site
• Bounce rate

A lot of people ask me “What should my bounce rate be?” or “How many pages should my users see per visit?” Honestly, I can’t answer that for you. Every industry is different, every conversion type is different.

For example, if you want people to sign up for an email newsletter, you could get them to do that on the first page they visit. One page per visit will result in a conversion, so one page per visit isn’t bad. If you sell $4,000-a-night vacation rentals, likely the more pages people look at, the more likely they are to book, so we want that number higher.

Ultimately, I advise you to watch your visitor metrics for major dips and peaks.

Did you redesign your site and your bounce rate went up drastically? Figure out why and fix it. Did you implement some changes that you thought would help but saw traffic drop drastically? Visitor analytics can help you watch and see those changes so you can adjust as quickly as possible.

Sources

The source of your traffic is another extremely important metric. A new website might see most of the traffic come from branded search, paid advertising or direct type-in.

As you implement optimized changes, and achieve more organic rankings for keyword phrases, you’ll see organic visits increase and might have the opportunity to decrease your paid advertising.

(Note: Think about decreasing or eliminating PPC budget carefully — it’s not always a good idea.)

Traffic sources overview report is the starting page to gaining insight into how people find your website. I think it is quite important to pay attention to the pie chart you see near the top of the overview page.

Not everyone agrees, but I think having a healthy balance of search, referral and direct traffic is good for your business.

If you have 84% organic search or paid search traffic like the company in the graph above, and Google makes an algorithm change that affects you (Panda update, anyone?), you can lose money extremely quickly.

If your sources are more balanced, and the same change affects traffic, it hurts, but not as much.

If you drill down a bit into your Traffic Source report, you can see which sources sent the most traffic. You might use this to determine whether a directory listing is worth the cost, or if your paid advertising is lucrative.

If you look at the individual source reports, you can see All Traffic, Direct, Referrals, Search and Campaigns. Campaigns is where your PPC accounts should live (see this “how to” in Google Analytics Help).

Landing Pages

Watching user metrics on your landing pages is a key metric to understanding whether the information you’re delivering matches the needs of the traffic you’re receiving.

You need to be sure your pay per click marketing is helping you, not just sucking your wallet dry. By keeping tabs on how your pay per click traffic performs once it hits your landing page, you can also mitigate lost dollars and improve landing pages to help visitors get what they are looking for from query to landing on and navigating your website.

High bounce rates on paid advertising landing pages mean you need to improve that experience for the user. High bounce rates on PPC landing pages could also be inflating your cost per click, because the quality score for that keyword in Google AdWords is probably pretty poor.

It’s important to watch the behavior of all traffic on your landing page. Organic search traffic that results in a high bounce rate might mean the ideas you’re optimizing that page for don’t necessarily match what a user might be looking for.

It’s also a great way to keep tabs on an agency, if you have one, because you want the optimized pages to draw visitors, keep them on the site and encourage them to book. High exit percentages and bounce rates on landing pages are a great way to know if what you have is good enough, or needs help.

Conversions

OK, this makes four metrics to watch, not three as promised, but this one doesn’t always apply to everyone. If you do collect money or measure a conversion on your website, you should pay attention to this from the start.

It can be a tad tricky measuring dollars from your website, so you might want to find an expert who can get it set up and configured for you. If you’re a tech-type person, you can probably trial and error yourself through the setup using Google’s “how to” on configuring e-commerce tracking.

Ultimately, you know your business best. What works for you might not work for your competitors, or your business goals just might be different. Starting out somewhere  is the key.

With the overwhelming amount of information, these three reports can help you get comfortable in Google Analytics so you feel confident digging deeper and understanding more complex metrics and what they mean for your business.

Here is a screen shot shared by @SEOsherlock.

Alex Moss claimed this was a privacy issue within Google Analytics. I didn’t see how this can necessarily be translated into such an issue, so I asked Google for a statement. A Google spokesperson confirmed this is a bug but is in no way a privacy issue, the page that opens for some users (I cannot replicate it myself) is completely random.

Google said:

We are aware of a potential issue where some users who click to open pages in their Content Reports via the icon in Google Analytics are seeing random domains rather than the website being tracked in their account. No private information is being shared during this process. Our team is working hard to fix it.

Postscript: Google informed me at 7:45pm EDT today that the bug has been fixed.

Path analysis has historically been a feature that provided little insights on user behavior, mainly because visitors behave in such non linear ways that it is hard to learn something from their paths, even when looking at aggregated data. The best option to path analysis has been to analyze micro conversions, i.e. looking at each page and trying to learn if the page has fulfilled its objective. However, the visualizations below bring some interesting approaches that will be very helpful for web analysts.

Flow Map Visualization

In terms of data visualization, this feature is probably the most advanced since Motion Charts, which is a highly advanced visualization that can be used to view five dimensions in one chart.

As some might recognize, the visualization used on this feature is very similar to the one created by Charles J. Mainard shown below. This image, created in a 1869 to describe Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign of 1812, displays several variables in a single two-dimensional image (source: Wikipedia):

• The army’s location and direction, showing where units split off and rejoined
• The declining size of the army (note e.g. the crossing of the Berezina river on the retreat)
• The low temperatures during the retreat.

Google has used this visualization to skillfully present website usage.

Visits Flow Report

This report shows the navigation flow for a specific segment of users, either a traffic source, country, browser, or any other segment that can be chosen from the drop down on the report (green box). We will see the pages that started the section for this segment and the following interactions (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc). Interactions can be added and removed, and the circle with the arrows on the left of the chart can be used to navigate between the interactions.

The connections between the pages represent the number of visitors who went from one node to another. Larger connections represent a larger % of visitors; red connections mean visitors left the site; looping connections mean they navigated to another page in the same node. The number of connections shown can be controlled using the slider above the chart.

Goal Flow Report

This report is a representation of goal conversion per segment of visitors (segments can be chosen as mentioned above). This visualization is welcomed as it enables analysts and managers to see goal conversion per any segment in one centralized place and with a great UI. Any goal can be seen on the chart, although as of this first release, Flow Visualizer supports only URL Destination goals. You can find the Goal Flow visualizer in the Conversions > Goals section of the “Standard Reporting Tab.”

Flow Navigation Report

This report enables Google Analytics users to divide websites into sections and learn how visitors navigate between those sections. An interesting case would be for ecommerce sites to understand how visitors navigate between search, category, product and cart pages; this would bring an important understanding that could be applied to site navigation structure. Below is an image showing the setup page:

In this interview with Phil Mui and Paul Murret (Director of Engineering, Google) talk about Google Analytics developments and future