Practical Analytics by DigiKnow

Tracking Multi-Channel Campaigns in Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking what happens on your website, but it is equally powerful for what happens just before someone comes to your website!  While tracking the referring source for your website visits happens automatically, when you are running a complex campaign with multiple advertising mediums and multiple entry points, setting it up right is critical to getting the data you want long term.

Landing Pages

The first thing to consider is where are you sending your visitors when they come in from the ad?  Ideally, you don’t just want to drop them on your home page.  In a perfect world, every visitor would come to a customized landing page that is closely tied to the ad they saw, where they saw it and when they saw it.  But, since we live in a real world of budgets, let’s just focus on the first one, which ad they saw.  Unless you are doing a huge branding campaign, your ads should have a call-to-action, either to go to the web, call an 800 number or go to the store.  Since we are talking about web analytics, let’s assume the first case.  So for each ad creative that you are running, you should have a landing page that matches the message and allows the visitor to fulfill the call-to-action from the ad.

Each of these landing should have a unique URL and be properly configured with Google Analytics tracking.  Every page should have a clear call-to-action and that action should be tracked, whether it is a click, a form submit or interaction with multimedia.  I’m not going to go into detail how to track each of those here, but just remember that everything needs to be tracked.  For multi-step conversions, also consider setting up a GA goal and conversion funnel.  If you have the time/budget and really want to make the landing page work for you, consider optimizing the page with varying headlines, images or calls-to-action (all within the context of the ad).

Tracking your Media

Now that we’ve got a strategy for landing pages, let’s consider how our visitors are coming into the site.  At a high-level, there are three types of media that we want to track: offline/traditional advertising, paid search advertising and display (banner/rich media) advertising.  While there are some similarities, each has it’s own unique set of parameters and considerations.

Traditional Media

Television, magazine, newspaper and radio are definitely the most challenging mediums to track with any accuracy since there is no direct pass through from ad to the website.  You are relying on people remembering the URL and then typing that into their browser.  Without any intentional tracking, the majority of this will come across as direct traffic with no referrer.  If you are starting a new campaign, you will probably also see a lift in search traffic due to people not remembering the exact URL or just using search instead of the address box in their browser.

The best way to track this traditional media traffic is with a specific URL for each ad.  There is a lot of debate about the best way to handle this, but I’ll try to lay out the options and my reasoning for and against each. 

• Option 1 - Custom domains for each ad – in this setup, you come up with a group of domain names that make sense for your brand/campaign and use those in your ads.  For example, if you have a snow plowing business you could buy jimssnowplow.com, jimssnowremoval.com, plowyourdriveway.com, clearmydriveway.com, etc.  The down side to this is you can create a very mixed branding message and cause more confusion than good.
• Option 2 – URLs with media type – this is probably the most common scenario you’ll see where an ad has the media type or publication name after the domain. For example, jimssnowplow.com/tv or jimssnowplow.com/timemag.  Although I don’t have the data to prove it, I think people are smart enough to realize that typing the “tv” or “timemag” after the URL isn’t necessary and they’ll just go to your home page.
• Option 3 – targeted URLs – this is my recommended solution and although not perfect, has the best chance of succeeding.  In this case, much like Option 2, you use your primary domain (jimssnowplow.com) but you append short words after it that tie to the ad’s call-to-action.  If you are giving a way a free shovel, use jimssnowplow.com/shovel/.  If you are having a contest, use /contest/.  And so on.  The key is to come up with a unique URL for each ad, meaning if you are running a contest in three different magazines, use /contest/, /sweepstakes/ and /win/. 

No matter which of these you use, you will need to track the incoming visit with a custom Google Analytics campaign URL.  To do this, you will need to build a custom tracking URL using Google’s URL Builder and then setup the domain/folder to redirect to that URL (you’ll probably need developer/IT support for this).  For the URL builder, you need to input several points of information for your ad.  Here’s my recommendation for those fields:

• Campaign Source: The advertiser you are driving from (Time Magazine, Cable, etc.)
• Campaign Medium: television, magazine, radio, outdoor, newspaper
• Campaign Content: Ad description (30sec-blizzard, 15sec-plow, fullpage-shovel)
• Campaign Name: “Winter 2010 Traditional”

The campaign source may be difficult to pinpoint narrowly and the campaign name might change depending on the big picture of what else is happening within your advertising.

Paid Search

Tracking paid search is much easier 1) since it is 100% digital and 2) all the search ad companies know that tracking is important.  If you are using Google AdWords, the setup is easy.  Under My Account, Account Preferences, make sure that Tracking “Auto-Tagging” is set to “Yes”. That’s it.

For Yahoo and Microsoft, it is a little more difficult, but not too bad.  You have to build the URLs manually for each ad, but by using the keyword variable, you can automatically insert the keyword within your ad group, so you get a more fine-grained tracking.

• Campaign Source: “Yahoo” (or Microsoft)
• Campaign Medium: “cpc”
• Campaign Keyword: {OVKEY} (for Yahoo) or {keyword} for Microsoft
• Campaign Name: “Winter 2010 Yahoo-Search”

This will setup the tracking in a way similar to Google AdWords, which gives you consistent reporting.  If you want to track conversions in the reporting from Yahoo or Microsoft, you’ll also need to put a tracking code in your conversion page(s).  Yahoo conversion tracking and Microsoft conversion tracking are easy to configure and you can see their sites for that information.  If you would like to read more on PPC tracking there is a good article on the PPC Hero blog.

Banner/Rich Media

The final medium I want to cover is online display advertising.  There are many players in this space and for the most part, the tracking process is the same.  Like in the other cases, you need to build a tracking URL with the GA URL Builder and put that into your network’s ad system.  Also much like the others, there is a conversion tracking code for on-site conversions (great breakdown of DoubleClick DART spotlight code).  What is a little different is that each network may allow for different types of tracking.  Since Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all do display advertising too, that process is the same as Paid Search, but your medium is “banner”.  For other networks you will use something like the setup below:

Campaign Source: Network Partner (casale, collective, etc.)

Campaign Medium: “banner”

Campaign Content: Ad description (160x600-blizzard, 300x250-plow, etc.)

Campaign Name: “Winter 2010 Online Display”

While I didn’t go into the details of every ad type (mobile advertising, affiliate programs and product engines), they are all part of the consideration and will also need to be carefully tracked and measured using similar techniques.

From Data to Action – DigiKnow Seminar Series

The presentation below is an abridged version of an hour plus presentation given on December 10th to DigiKnow's clients and friends. We just finished editing the 90 minutes of audio down to 30 minutes today and added that on SlideShare.  Unfortunately this version of the presentation does not include the live demo/tour of the latest and greatest features of Google Analytics.  (maybe next time I’ll fire up Camtasia and record the whole thing!)

Web Analytics - From Data to Action

View more presentations from Scott Chapin.

The Analytics of Site Search Effectiveness

As the amount of content on the Internet has grown beyond all reasonable measure, search has become the critical tool for finding information across the myriad of sites available today.  Has your site also grown beyond its bounds?  If so, site search is the best way to make your content discoverable.
Hopefully if your site is beyond 50 pages, you already have a site search.  But how effective is it?  Have you ever checked?  Here are a few tips of places to start to learn from how visitors are using your site search.

Make sure your site search provides useful statistics. 
If you are using a built-in search that came with your CMS or server software, you might not be able to see any details on what visitors are doing, aside from what search terms they are using.  Other key data to know are top queries, queries with no results, and queries with no clicks.  The best approach is a combination of data from the site search engine itself and from your analytics solution.  Both tools can tell you top queries and click-through rates, but a good site search engine can tell you what searches returned no results, and your analytics tool can tell you exit rates, time after search, etc.

Where are searches hitting a dead end?
The best way to support a visitor in his quest to find content on your site is to make sure they never hit a dead end.  This can happen in two main ways: entering a search that returns no results and getting search results that aren’t relevant. 

Using two of the stats mentioned above, you can track and react to this situation.  Queries with no results will show you the keywords that were entered and came back with no content at all.  The most common case of this is a misspelled term in the search.  The quick remedy to this is to either establish a misspellings/synonyms list, if your engine supports it.  Otherwise, you can add the misspelled keyword into the meta tags on the page itself.

In searches with no click-throughs, your visitor did a search that returned results, but they weren’t relevant enough to get a click.  Correcting this can be a little trickier.  You need to figure out what the visitor was probably looking for and then adjust page ranking to make more relevant pages come up higher in the results.  The best way to do this is with updated keywords and content, rather than tweaking your search engine, because making content updates helps external SEO and internal site search results.

Never leave a visitor hanging
In the cases where a search returns no links, be sure to give your visitor options how to find the content they need.  As a minimum first step, include a link to the contact form.  Imagine you are at Home Depot looking for a bolt to finish a project.  You did a search (looking up and down the aisle) and now you are stuck.  You push the contact us (“special assistance needed”) button to get help.  The best retailers have adopted this customer friendly system, why shouldn’t you do the same. 

Secondarily, on the blank results page, include tips about how to do a better search and provide links to a site map or product specific searches, if those exist.  Since you don’t know what the user was looking for while they were searching, these recommendations have to be fairly generic and open ended.

Reviewing site search data as part of your regular analytics process will greatly improve your visitor experience . 

 

[This is a reprint/update of a previous post I wrote years ago, but somehow the more things change, the more they stay the same!]

Google keeps the new features coming

Google delivered an early Christmas present on Monday announcing some new features that will be coming out soon.  You can read the full text at Google’s Analytics blog, but I wanted to both make you aware and give you my take on the new features.

Annotations

As I said in the comments on Google’s post “Hallelujah”.  Because “why” is such an important part of analytics, being able to record the cause of a spike (or dip) is very important.  Until now, I’ve had to manage that in Excel or in a screenshot with annotations in PowerPoint or Word.  Having those in separate sources meant that as time goes on, my records got messy and it was hard to overlay my info on the GA data.  Annotations fixes that.  You can now go into GA and on the timeline, make a note of what happened that day.  Because we have multiple agencies working together and multiple analysts even within DigiKnow, this is a great feature for sharing knowledge.

Although none of my logins have access to this new feature yet to try it first hand, from the video, I really like how they are handling sharing.  Notes can be public to the profile or private to the user.  For every other GA customization (reports, segments, intelligence) you have to share the information via link to other users, but with this, it’s just there for everyone.  I hope that they roll out this system to those other customizations AND leave in the cross-profile sharing too.

 

Custom Variables in Segments & Custom Reports

While I think annotations are for the masses, custom variables (launched in October) are definitely for the more advanced GA users.  I haven’t really talked about this yet (or played with it), but until recently, you could only have one custom variable per domain.  So for a client that I wanted to track two things, I had to jam it into a single field.  With unlimited custom variables, you can track anything without having to be cautions of “wasting” the variable.  Some great things to track are registered vs. non-registered users, previous purchasers, visitor profiles established through questions/surveys, etc.  This is very powerful stuff.  Having the ability to segment by and report on these data is an obvious next step.

Code Setup Wizard

Google keeps adding features that makes configuration of complicated things simpler, putting me out of a job.  Good.  Although setting up multiple domains, sub-domains, etc. is definitely an art, I’m all for a wizard that just makes it happen.  There are parts of analytics that should and do require deep thought, but configuration shouldn’t be one of them.  Just like the GA URL Builder (for tracking campaigns), having a form or system to make setup easier saves time that can be better spend on more meaningful tasks.

 

There is also an announcement coming this week about API updates.  Probably to give access to these new data points.  I’ll update this post with a link to it when the announcement is made, but I don’t think any of you will probably be lining up at the Googleplex to hear that announcement.

UPDATE: Here’s the link to the Google Analytics API updates.

 

So what’s still missing?  We’ll plenty could be added, but the one simple thing that I’m dying for them to add is an import/export or sharing feature for Filters.  Given that we are now able to share custom reports, custom insights and advanced segments, it seems like only a matter of time. 

Using Analytics to Prioritize Your Attack Strategy

Prioritization is one of the hardest parts of digital marketing.  There are just so many options and all of them look great.  Now there are two sides to this coin.  On the positive side, if everything is working pretty well, where do you invest next.  If things aren’t going so well, which hole in the dike to you try to plug first.  Today, I’d like to offer some advice on how to use analytics to guide these decisions.

1. Know what’s working (or not working)

The first part of any prioritization is to look at what is working or has worked in the past.  This is by no means a trivial task, especially if you are starting from scratch or haven’t been regularly measuring your activities in the past.  The first point of attack should be looking at all the sources of traffic on your website and determining which are most successful at achieving your goal (leads, sales, downloads, etc.).  Most systems will easily break out search, referrals, campaigns and direct traffic in their basic reporting.  This is a great starting point, but I encourage you do dig deeper. 

For a more granular assessment of your traffic sources, if you don’t have these segmented already, break out email marketing traffic (most easily seen as referrers with “mail” in the domain name), affiliate programs, sales lead engines and promotion aggregators (coupons, sweepstakes, white papers, etc.).  If you are at all active in Social Media (and probably even if you aren’t), also check the traffic levels from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

By looking at each of these sources individually (even to specific campaigns), you can see which ones achieve your goals, whatever they may be.

 

2. Look for untapped opportunities

In the first step, we looked primarily at things you “caused” to happen, either through paid engagements or self-promotion.  After looking at those things, be sure to check out areas that might be providing you traffic that you didn’t cause (or worse, aren’t aware of).  This may be social media sites or promotion aggregators.  It might be trade websites or partners.  The best way to identify these sources is to look through your Referrers and try to understand what the cause/interest is from your top 20 (or 50) traffic sources.

 

3. Assess the costs of each opportunity

Now for the hard part, determining which areas are the most effective and where opportunities lie.  Let’s assume that you find you have the following simple setup:

Traffic Source	Conversion Rate
Banner Campaign	3%
Paid Search	4%
Organic Search	6%
Affiliate Program	10%
Email Marketing	20%
Social Media	3%

The next step is to look at the cost of creating the levels of traffic/conversion you currently have.

Traffic Source	Costs	Cost Per Lead
Banner Campaign	$10/CPM	$0.20
Paid Search	$2.50/CPC	$0.40
Organic Search	$10,000/yr	$0.10
Affiliate Program	25% commission	$3.00
Email Marketing	$3,000/mailing	$0.50
Social Media	$5000/yr	$0.10

Email marketing seems to have one of the best combinations of high conversion rate and relatively low cost.  Let’s do more email.  This is where a lot of people might stop.  But there’s a catch, each lead source has it’s own factors around what the source’s growth capabilities.  Email, for example, is usually a finite set of customers/interested consumers that can’t quickly be expanded.  Social media is hard to grow rapidly.  Paid search, affiliate programs and banners can be scaled nearly infinitely, but the costs are high.  What do you do?

4. Test and Measure

The answer: test!  Although this may seem anticlimactic, it’s the right answer.  One of the greatest advantages we have in digital marketing today is the ability to quickly scale up, instantly measure, and see what is working.  In this overly simplified analysis, I didn’t share any information on real or projected sales/profits from these leads (and that needs to be part of a real analysis), but for this company, I’d recommend experimenting with expanding paid search (easy scalability), affiliate programs (scalability, conversion) and email (low/in-house cost, high conversion) and see if these move the needle.

5. Analyze and repeat

Of course the ideal plan is to be doing this on continual basis, but I’m well aware that not everyone has the time needed to looks at traffic sources and conversion rates on a daily basis.  That being said, it doesn’t mean you can set-it and forget-it.  After you tweak your email creative or expand to new subscriber sources, make sure to see if it helped (or hurt) your efforts.  In paid media, are you getting just as much out of your 1000th dollar and you did from your first?  Determining the optimal mix is not easy, but that is what takes digital marketing to the next level.