Analytics Posts from the Internet Marketing Blog
Commonly Used PPC Metrics: What They Will and Won't Tell You
ImpressionsAn impression, in online advertising, is an appearance of an ad on a web page. In search engine marketing, an impression constitutes an appearance of a text ad on a search engine results page. Internet advertising costs are sometimes measured in cost per impression. An impression will tell you how many people have been exposed to your brand or product.
What impressions won’t tell you: If that exposure actually left “an impression.” Search behavior tends to be a fast and reactive experience. Often users only look at one or two results on a page. Even if your ad is at the top of the list, it may be missed.Click-Through Rate (CTR)Your PPC click-through rate is the percentage of people who view your ad (impressions) that actually go on to click the ad. You can view your cl... > Read more
Completing the PPC Lead Conversion Picture with Call Tracking
In most cases, leads are the premier metric for any pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. Sure, click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), bounce rate, pages per visit, and other data are important. This information is great for measuring performance and progress -- and optimizing campaigns -- but typically the end goal of a PPC campaign is generating leads and ultimately sales.
Tracking online conversions is easy with PPC and web analytics programs, such as Google AdWords and Google Analytics. These tools associate online conversions directly with a campaign, ad group, ad and keyword. Unfortunately, as soon as someone picks up a phone, this useful lead intelligence is lost. To effectively gauge PPC campaign success you need to see all pieces of the lead-conversion puzzle, whether activ... > Read more
Custom Reports vs. Advanced Segments in Google Analytics: What's the Difference?
One of the most under-utilized aspects of Google Analytics is the tool's filtering and segmentation capabilities. By using custom reports you can get at some very useful and actionable data, but a lot of people don't fully understand how custom reports and advanced segments work and how they can be leveraged to gain insights into your online marketing efforts.
In this post we'll walk through the difference between custom reports and advanced segments, and where and why you might want to use one and not the other.How is a Custom Report Different From an Advanced Segment?The main thing here is to think of custom reports as reports, and advanced segments as filters. (NOTE: Important and hopefully not too confusing distinction: There is a separate function within Google Analytics that is actual... > Read more
Quick and Dirty Google Analytics Custom Reports, Part 2
I recently wrote up a short, actionable custom report from Google Analytics to help you get at some useful SEO and keyword level analytic data in a few short steps. This time we'll try to keep it equally short and just as sweet, and walk through a custom report that can help you to understand how different types of content perform.
Getting Unique Visitor & Goal Data on Content Segments with Custom Reports SEO Moz had a couple of great posts on benchmarking and analyzing different segments of your site's content. Those posts do a really nice job of explaining exactly why comparing various types of content are important, and what we'll do here is walk through how you can get a bit higher resolution look at exactly what's going on with different types of content. First, we need to set up ... > Read more
Quick and Dirty Google Analytics Custom Reports, Part 1
There are a lot of great Google Analytics hacks and a myriad of ways to get at some terrific data in Google and other analytics packages. This can be a great asset for veteran analysts, but the different ways available to slice and dice data inside of these analytics packages can often overwhelm small businesses and those new to analytics.
In this post and in a follow-up post, we'll walk through two very simple custom reports that you can set up in Google Analytics to get actionable insights surrounding keyword-driven traffic and subsequently traffic to certain types of content on your site. Creating a Google Analytics Custom Report Setting up custom reports is very simple. First, you select Manage Custom Reports: Next, you can create a new report: Google has a nice overview of how to cr... > Read more
Announcing The Power User's Guide to Google Analytics Hacks, Tips and Tricks
Google Analytics (GA) is undoubtedly the most popular web analytics tool on the planet. If you're a search marketer, blogger or online business owner, you likely use Google Analytics on a daily basis to do some basic traffic and performance analysis. But like many, you're probably not harnessing the full power of Google Analytics.
So to help you get even more out of GA, we reached out to 17 Google Analytics experts to create The Power User's Guide to Google Analytics Hacks, Tips and Tricks. The guide features a variety of advanced user features from our all star lineup of Google Analytics Hacks Panelists, including Aaron Wall, Vanessa Fox, Joost de Valk, David Harry, Will Critchlow, Ann Smarty, Brian Clifton, Justin Cutroni, Bryan Eisenberg, Bas van den Beld and many more analytics exper... > Read more
Google AdWords Search Funnels: What Are Search Funnels?
Last week Google announced a new tool for its AdWords customers to measure conversions: Search Funnels.Search Funnels are a collection of reports that detail the Google.com search ad click and impression conduct leading up to a conversion. The reports, for example, show the number and percentage of conversions that were “assisted.
” Assisted conversions result from two or more Google searches. The user conducts a keyword search, sees or clicks on a particular ad, and then abandons the ad. Then, sometime within the next 30 days, the user conducts another keyword search, sees another ad for the same company, and clicks on it. A conversion follows. Search Funnels also show advertisers which keywords led to assisted conversions, the number and percentage of conversions that resulted fr... > Read more
Using Google Analytics Benchmarking to Improve Your Website
The following is a guest post by Marshall Sponder of WebMetricsGuru. A few years ago, Google Analytics added benchmarking, allowing site owners to compare their own sites to others in the same category. Of course, many sites fit into more than one category, and to enable benchmarking, you must first enable data sharing from within your analytics settings.
Using my art blog, ArtNewYorkCity.com, I wanted to see how well it performs against other blogs in its category. Selecting the right category is crucial for this exercise – fortunately, Google Analytics has a fairly rich selection to choose from, especially if you drill down a few levels. Once you have chosen a category, you can view six charts (see below) comparing your site with the averages of other sites in its category, ... > Read more
Leverage Analytics Intelligence to Be Alerted to Important Changes in Your PPC Campaign
At the end of October, Google Analytics announced a series of exciting updates. Included was the Analytics Intelligence engine which algorithmically tracks significant changes to patterns in your website’s metrics. This engine works both as an automatic feature for general alerts and a custom feature for you to leverage Intelligence based on any metric and/or traffic source you choose.
Intelligence comes with the ability to provide Daily, Weekly or Monthly alerts. As a PPC manager, I'm thrilled to be able to let Google track my data and tell me when things are going well, and more importantly - not going well. Today I'm going to share with you some quick ideas on how you can leverage Analytics Intelligence for your own PPC campaigns. But just in case you missed the offici... > Read more
The Future of Keyword Research: WordStream 1.6
Keyword research as we know it suffers from a major disconnect. On one hand, you have keyword tools, which provide keyword suggestions and associated keyword frequency estimates. On the other hand, you have web analytics applications, which provide you with the actual search queries that are driving traffic to your site, and the true relevancy of your keywords based on real conversion data.
But there is no reason for these two types of tools to be divorced from each other. In fact, in my experience, successful keyword research largely depends on your ability to leverage and manage data from both keyword tools and web analytics in a continuous fashion. Let's take a look at why neither keyword tools nor web analytics alone is sufficient for complete keyword research, and how the future of ke... > Read more
