Archive for the ‘ROI Analytics’ Category

How To Simplify Your Analytics Data for Your Boss

Tom Cull

by Tom Cull

December 13th, 2012

Making Data Simple

Too Much Data? Keep It Simple

In this age of data, people at all levels of business have access to their company’s website traffic metrics. Often, it’s those further down the ladder who are expected to stay on top of it, whether they like it or not. Richard Branson is famous for not wanting to understand his company’s financial data in too much detail. He doesn’t need to – but he does need to know the basics to make good decisions, which he does to great effect. His mind is free of the clutter to make the big picture decisions.

Like Branson, many business owners are strapped for time and cannot spend hours parsing through their web analytics accounts. They are looking for simplified data. Believe me, it’s a challenge not lost on SEO practitioners. Here’s some suggestions if you’re using Google Analytics, to help your boss see the big picture.

1. Create a custom dashboard with just your main reports

From your Home screen within GA, you can easily add and remove widgets to build a dashboard that highlights metrics you’re most interested in. Personally I don’t think that GA has done a good job with the display, but it will keep reports in one interface.

2. Use the Google Analytics ‘Shortcuts’

Here you can essentially pin you favorite reports to the sidebar and click-through them like a navigation. This is my favorite way of navigating through. Simply pull open the full report of your choice (selecting any criteria you like) and click the Shortcut button in the toolbar toward the top of the screen.

3. Set up weekly or monthly email reports

You can set up reports in PDF (looks the best) or other formats, to be emailed automatically with a frequency of your choosing. These report contain more ‘raw data,’ but it’s handpicked by you, and you can add an intro to the emails to explain.

4. Use a 3rd party service

There are companies out there that specialize in providing data services. One Boston firm called Lucidel, for example, simplifies Google Analytics reports and as an extra bonus includes demographic data through a data collecting API.

5. Create a 1-page executive summary

Depending on how frequent these are needed and how much time you have, you could pull together a 1-pager with top-level metrics, some other data insights and a quick analysis.

If you have hours to spend in Google Analytics, there’s a great deal of insight to be learned about your website.  For your time-strapped boss, start with the suggestions above to keep them easily informed about important top-level metrics.

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First Impressions of Google Analytics 5

Tom Cull

by Tom Cull

June 29th, 2011

As some of you may know by now, the new Google Analytics 5 user interface is upon us, all shiny and new.

A more user-friendly navigation

As a long time user and fan of Google’s previous version, I’ve been gradually trying to integrate the new version into my workday. As a disclaimer, this post is geared towards people like me, who will need to go cold turkey for a while, in order to wholeheartedly embrace this new UI.  For anyone who is starting out with the new version, however: What you’ve never had, you won’t miss.

A Better User Interface?

One of the biggest ‘improvements’ Google has made is are a more intuitive navigation with more layman-friendly nomenclature, cutting the fat by reducing the number of reports available to the most important. Report names such as ‘demographics‘, ‘behavior‘ and ‘engagement‘ have replaced less friendly terms, and display within handy collapsible drop down menus, reducing the amount of clicks to get to reports.

The Conversions area is vastly improved also, with goal URLs and reverse goal path much easier to work with, which makes reporting on conversions more streamlined. Being able to quickly understand which pages converted visitors is key and Google provide up to 3 previous steps to see what visitors clicked on that led to the conversion. Two thumbs up!

Introducing 17 Customizable Dashboards

Google Analytics Widget Editor

New Widget Editor

It’s been something I have stressed for while, which is to make sure your dashboard is useful and not just there for the sake of it. Well, I got my wish – kind of. One time saver the old version has over this new one is the ability to ‘add to dashboard’ straight off a report.  Unless I have missed something, there is not that option here, so that means you’re gonna have to build dashboard reports from scratch. If you have multiple profiles, then this will be a time-suck.

That being said, it’s an opportunity to carve up the various aspects of your site into component dashboards such as referring sites, content engagement and conversions.

But What Happened To…

1. In Page Analytics? – I love this tool to help me understand click-through rates and how visitors are responding to site architecture, but where has it gone? Answers on a postcard, please, or leave a comment.

2. My Old Reports? – Google says to “use the Report Finder to locate your Version 4 reports in the new Version 5 interface.” I clicked the link to the Report Finder and was greeted with a 404 error. Help me out here Google!

3. Emailing My Reports? – The scheduled reporting is a handy feature to email particular reports. If you know where this has gone let me know!

4. Exporting Reports to PDF? - I have used this feature to send a quick PDF report to a client’s laptop during board presentations. It’s great for drilling into some data and firing off a print-friendly sheet, but where has this gone?

5. Goals Overview? – You can still see your goals, but the handy overview screen that let’s you compare to past is not there. You can only see the url paths, which is easier to view but still not great for clients or newbies.

Call Me Old-Fashioned, But…

old fashioned phone box
They still work you know…

I’m not fully won-over with this version yet. It’s a bit like getting the first iPhone or iPad, only to know that in 6 months, all the bugs and improvements will be made and the version 2 will be out and even better. If you have enough of your own time to experiment with building dashboards and discovering what works and doesn’t works, that’s a great way to learn, which is what I did with the previous version.

No doubt I’ll write a follow up to this and might have changed my mind, so feel free to agree or disagree and leave your feedback about this new version!

For some counterpoints and in an in depth review, here’s leading Analytics practitioner and friend of Union Street Media, Justin Cutroni.

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If you don’t ask for something in life, you’ll never get it

Ted Adler

by Ted Adler

March 30th, 2011

One of the lessons my entrepreneurial father taught me at an early age is that “If you don’t ask for something in life, you’ll never get it.”  Over the years, I’ve invoked The Richard Adler Rule with abandon.  Why?  Because the worst case scenario when you make a request of someone is that they say no.  If you get that response, which I do at times, then simply move on and ask someone else.  Another way of looking at making requests is that if you start out with nothing, the worst you’ll do is break even.  I’ve always felt this applies to most anyone, but is especially true for those in the non-profit realm looking to raise money off of the web.

A happy guy who got what he asked for

Sometimes the things I ask for are significant.  Other times they’re trivial.  One of my favorite recent invocations of The Richard Adler Rule happened at Blue Sky Basin at Vail during my ski vacation this past winter.  If you head up to the top of Blue Sky Basin at lunch hour on a clear day, you’ll find an incredible view of the Rockies, three free gas-powered grills and a bunch of happy BYO-lunch skiers cooking up a storm.  After an incredible morning on the mountain, we got up there to find they were sold out of sandwiches in the lodge.  So despite a slight roll of the eyes from my girlfriend, who has seen this show before, I starting asking fellow skiers for leftover grill-able items.  Thanks to a kind fellow who brought a few extras, one man’s to-be trash became our treasure.  We sure did enjoy those two perfectly cooked hot dogs.

However, I’m also a big believer in paying-it-forward.  You can’t just take.  When folks move to Burlington, I’m happy to spend half an hour with them in my office giving them the lay of the land.  At the end of the conversation, I’ll hand them a sticky note with the names of companies they should check out that could be a good fit for their skill set.  The list will often include names of people they might want to grab lunch with because that person might be the person, or know the person, that could end up hiring them.  The sticky note will always include who to call when their car breaks down (Darren Smith, 802.660.3111).  That’s a number I’ve long since memorized, which is a sign that I’ve followed another Richard Adler rule of buying reliable used vehicles (and then driving them into the ground).

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Posted in Content Creation Ideas, Interactive Websites, Our Clients, ROI Analytics | 3 Comments »

SERP Obsession and the Google Sandbox

Tom Cull

by Tom Cull

March 15th, 2011

Don’t get me wrong – I love Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERPS). I love seeing a client get to page 1 for their goal term in Google and they love me for helping them.

What’s not to love about this? Well, for one, making bad decisions about your site. You also need to understand why sometimes your site will experience fluctuations in ranking, just like the stock market.

Here’s a few factors to consider before becoming SERP obsessed and and reacting to fluctuations.

Different States, Different SERPs

Geographical Location

Depending on where your IP address is, search engines are going to try to serve up as localized results as possible. That’s why if I am in Vermont and searching on Californian Real Estate, I am going to get differently weighted results than someone in California searching. If I am in California searching on California Real Estate, then I am more likely to see local companies show up on page 1 or 2 than big national ones.

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NY Times Article: The Dirty Little Secret Of Search

John Merse

by John Merse

February 18th, 2011

How JC Penney Got In Trouble With Google

NY Times writer David Segal wrote a great article about JC Penney attempt to ‘’cheat’’ Google and increase their organic rankings. As we know, Google’s goal is to search every corner of the Internet and find the most important, relevant sites that match the query you typed in. But what is the cost of being a relevant website and ranking number one for numerous keywords? JC Penney unfortunately found out the cost of trying to fool Google into instant rankings across the board.  These sorts of tactics, known as “Black Hat” SEO, comes with consequences (and is of course not what we recommend).  This article brings up the issue of using Black Hat versus White Hat SEO.

What Exactly Did JC Penney Do?

JC Penney hired an Internet Marketing firm helped them improve their website rankings. The firm was able to get Penney’s website ranking to number one for terms you wouldn’t necessarily consider JC Penney to be the genuine best result for. The way they achieved this seemingly incredible feat was by linking hundreds upon hundreds of websites to jcpenney.com. This strategy is typically considered “black hat” and their quick rise to power alerted some analysts that something could be wrong.

Part of Google’s ranking system revolves around the number and quality of links to a site, essentially measuring its popularity. Google looked into some of the back links the company was using to boost its search rankings. The clear giveaway was that their webpages received links from irrelevant sites about diseases, cameras, cars, dogs, diamond drills, tiles, and real estate. Upon further review, most of the sites that linked to them were all but abandoned. Google refers to these tactics as “link schemes.” Even though the abandoned sites had nothing to do with Penney products, with enough of them, they help. Matt Cutts, who is the head of Google’s Webspam team commented on the issue saying, “Am I happy this happened? Absolutely not. Is Google going to take strong corrective action? We absolutely will.”

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Posted in Internet Marketing, ROI Analytics, Search Engine Optimization | 2 Comments »

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