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.

Thanksgiving for Analytics

Sure it’s cliché, and of course I am more thankful for a lot of things (my wife, kids, family, job, etc.), but I truly am thankful for analytics.  Since tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the United States, I figured I’d share a few of the things I’m thankful for.

 

1. Mainstream Acceptance - The biggest thing I’m thankful for is that I really feel that analytics are starting to move into the mainstream of online (and offline) marketing.  While we’ve been doing web analytics for over a decade, it has unfortunately been used mainly in monster web projects and Ecommerce websites.  Analytics is for everyone, even a mid-sized agency like DigiKnow, and I’m happy that people are starting to realize it.
   
2. Better Tools - One of the biggest reason that analytics has moved into the mainstream are that the tools are so much better today than even 2 years ago.  This year (yes in 2009) I ran across clients running AWStats and Webtrends 7.0 as their primary tools.  These were great tools in their day (and I occasionally recommend AWStats for some quick log analysis), but they shouldn’t be primary tools today. 
   
3. Strong Community – without advocates and educators, we’d never move forward.  From the Web Analytics Association to Avinash Kaushik and Eric Peterson, we have a lot of strong resources that make analytics approachable and understandable.

I’m sure there is more, but it’s the day before a holiday and my brain is already half checked out.  Have a great Thanksgiving.

 

Update: My copy of Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics 2.0 book arrived from Amazon today (wasn’t supposed to arrive until Monday), so I’m thankful for that too!

Website Optimization

Today, I want to spend a little time on what for some might be “the basics”, but is an often overlooked and always important part of analytics.  Generally when people think of analytics, they think of two things: reports or insights.  I’d like to place a third item on that list today: optimization.  While technically this is just another way to get insights, it is different enough that I think it deserves it’s own separate attention (and this blog post!). 

Website Optimization is the practice of letting the site visitors choose which version of a page or page element is best.  This isn’t by voting, but my their unbiased actions.  Website optimization comes in two basic forms: A/B testing and Multivariate testing.  In A/B testing you generally create two entire pages and randomly show one or the other to each visitor as they come to the site.  One design may have a big product photo and the other may have a chart showing how the product delivers value.  In A/B testing, the winner is determined by seeing which of these two designs produces more sales, leads or whatever other conversion you might have.

The second major optimization testing practice is multivariate testing.  In this scenario, individual elements within a single page are changed randomly.  Generally this is two or more elements, such as a headline, body text, photo/image, call-to-action or really anything else.  The chart on the right shows two elements (star and circle) being varied based on color, position and inclusion.  These test are more complicated to setup and also require a great deal more traffic to determine a winner. Fortunately tools like Google Website Optimizer or Ominture’s Test & Target take a lot of the leg-work out of configuring these tests.

Here are a few examples of where DigiKnow has used this recently, and the results we achieved.

Case #1

A manufacturer had been using their website to generate leads for their direct-sales product.  Over some time, they had continued to see their conversion rates from AdWords and other sources heading in the wrong direction.  The DigiKnow analytics team was brought in to review their process and help identify areas that could be improved.  After reviewing their Google Analytics and overall configuration, we recommended using Google Website Optimizer targeted at the paid search traffic.  Although we considered many optimization elements on the site, because of the desired turn around for answers and the volume of traffic running through the test, we limited the number of variables in each experiment.  In some cases we optimized headlines, in others image variations and on still others call-to-action/response mechanisms.

The result: over the course of 6 months, their paid search conversion rate was up 60% over the low and in certain cases, was even much higher.   The best example within their test set was in testing a customer testimonial against a product chart image, the winning configuration returned nearly twice the site average. This is just one example of the quick wins that were derived from this program.

Case #2

My second case is a little different from the first one in that we didn’t use an off-the-shelf optimizer tool.  Our client in this case had a small product information (not sales) website and wanted some insights into which products were the most popular.  When we reviewed their analytics, we weren’t too surprised when the popularity of the products matched the order of the products within the navigation.  The most popular item was first on the list, second most popular was second, etc. We recommended that we randomize the product order (within two product categories) to determine the true popularity.  Because the navigation appeared in three separate places on the site, we ended up implementing custom programming to handle the randomization, then used Google Analytics to assess the data.

The results: As expected, we found that in the first product group, the popularity of the products was directly dependant on their order in the list.  The first product got the most traffic, the second next, and the third the least.  What was more interesting was that in the second group (always listed after the first) this was not the case.  After people looked past the first group, they were just as likely to click the fourth link as the seventh (4 products in group #2).  We also looked at which individual products performed above or below the mean for their position and were able to determine which were truly most popular.  One interesting insight from this was a product in Group #2 that was below average in most positions, was actually the most popular in the last position.  Somehow the product image must have drawn the eye most when it was at the end of the list. 

To further this experiment, we are updating the product images of the underperforming products to see if we can increase their appeal relative to the other products or if they are ultimately just less interesting overall.

 

These are just two examples of how optimization can quickly answer some of the assumptions that companies (and agencies) make when we are building websites. 

Optimization lets you know what works, rather than just guessing.

More new Google features: Content Advanced Filter and Intelligence

Google continues to release new features and I got access to more of them this week.  I must say it’s always exciting to log into Google Analytics and find a new feature just waiting for me.  That is exactly what happened twice this week.

On Monday, I had been reviewing some client data for a while when I noticed a new link at the bottom of the page that says “Advanced Filter”.  It made me pause and think… was that there before?  It turns out that it wasn’t and I’ve talked with others that said they found it on their profiles starting last Friday.  At first, I wasn’t sure how useful this new feature was because you can already do a lot just with the current page filter with “containing” or “excluding”.  (If you aren’t aware, you can even put regular expressions in that box to make it more powerful).  So for the last two days, I though, "why did they add that”, then today, I found a perfect case for it.

One frustration with a large list of data, like all the content pages on a site, is that when you sort it, you don’t always get something useful back.  For example, I was looking for the pages with the highest bounce rates.  Before this week, if I sorted by bounce rate, it would put a page at the top with 100% bounce, but it was a page that was only viewed one time.  By using the Advanced Filter, I could limit the display set to pages with 10,000 views or more, THEN sort by bounce rate.  This gave me the “important” pages with the highest bounce rates.  Of course, you always could export this to Excel and filter/manipulate it there, but this is much faster.

Selecting the Criteria	Filter Applied

 

The other major addition that I got this week was Google Analytics Intelligence BETA (of course).  This has been out for a while, but I just got access to it this week.  Actually I have access to it only in 2 of the 3 accounts I regularly use for analytics.  My main account for DigiKnow still doesn’t have access, so my use of it has been been limited.  The video from Google does a great job explaining it, so I’ll put you in their capable hands.

 

 

So what does this mean for analysts like me?  Am I out of a job?  I hope not and I don’t think so.  This is a great tool to help identify major shifts in what is happening on your site.  To me, the more people that are able to see that things ARE changing and ask the all import question “why”, the better off we all will be.  This feature is another feather in Google’s cap and I continue to be amazed that they give all of this to us for free.

I’ll write more about suggestions for Custom Alerts for Intelligence once I’ve played with it a little more.

 

NOTE: I found out that if I give my personal Google user (that has Intelligence access) rights to a Google Analytics Account, then I can see the Intelligence report for the account.  Come on Google, share it with ALL my user accounts.

Using Google Analytics to track website leads

DigiKnow is a medium-sized web development/interactive agency.  While our client websites get tens of thousands of visitors each day, DigiKnow’s own traffic is much more modest.  Our site is designed to connecting with potential clients and partners that are looking for a great agency to help them navigate the muddy waters of digital communications. 

Because our website focused on lead generation, our sales team was curious to know who was coming to the site, both to see who is following up after an initial contact and who is potentially looking at us for an RFP distribution.  They did some research and looked at several commercial services (Demandbase, VisitorTrack, LEADSExplorer, or LeadLander) that will provide insights into who is visiting your site. 

I caught wind of this conversation and suggested that we could produce a similar solution with Google Analytics, for FREE!  The commercial solutions are not expensive (a few hundred dollars pre month), but it’s hard to argue with free.  Here’s what I setup for them:

1. First, I created an Advanced Segment that I called “Exclude Major ISPs”.  One of the big advantages the commercial products have is that they have established a database of large internet service providers (ISP) that are filtered out of their reporting.  Building this segment in Google Analytics is a big pain, but fortunately because of the new sharing feature, I can share the work I already did and link to it here:

Google Analytics Advanced Segment: Exclude Major ISPs

(I update the segment regularly, and this link will always provide you the latest version, but if you really want to stay on top of this, stop back and download it monthly.  If you have improved my segment, please put your link in the comments!)

 

2. Second, I setup an email alert that sends the sales team a PDF each day of the visitors from the previous day.  To do this, go to Network Location (under Visitors, Network Properties) and I chose to sort it by Pages/Visit.  Be sure to have the “Exclude Major ISPs” segment active at this point.

 

 

3. Then click Email, then pick the Schedule tab.  In the schedule, enter the email address(es) desired, put in a subject line (like “Website Leads”) and select a date range of “Daily”.

 

 

Now you’ve created your own lead analytics system.

 

I will say, that the commercial products do have advantages, including deeper reporting and more timely report generation. But if you are looking for a free solution and already running Google Analytics, this might be a great place to start.

Verifying Google Webmaster Tools on a TypePad Blog

[UPDATE] Paul commented below that I went about this the hard way.  Apparently there is a simple file upload tool in Typepad, so you just need to download the HTML file from Google (or Yahoo) and upload it through the file manager.  This makes two things apparent 1) I’m not a Typepad expert and 2) the Typepad user interface does not make this very obvious (it’s hidden under “Library”).  I assumed this feature had to exist, but since I couldn’t find it, I solved my problem as outlined below.  Maybe Typepad needs to look at THEIR analytics data to better understand usability issues.  I guess that’s a post for another day.

--------------------------------

Website analytics can cover a wide variety of areas including media campaigns, email marketing and SEO.  Today’s how-to is a bit of an extension on the SEO front, and for anyone using TypePad , this will hopefully be a big help.  I was surprised that I wasn’t able to find any clear instructions on how to verify a TypePad blog in Google Webmaster tools. 

If you aren’t familiar with Google Webmaster Tools, it is a bit of a under-the-hood view of your search traffic, from the Google side of things.  I’ll write more about it later, but for now, if you aren’t familiar with it, check it out.

So my challenge was to verify this blog with Google so that I could submit a site map and see how people are searching on Google for this topics related to our blog.  I’ve verified lots of sites before with Google, but usually we have direct FTP/code access, making the process very easy.

For the Practical Analytics blog, we are using a standard TypePad template, with a minor modification(the logo in the banner).  Unfortunately, the standard template doesn’t let you access the necessary meta data and TypePad doesn’t let you upload your own HTML files (these are the two ways of verifying you are who you say you are with Google).  So here’s my work around:

1. Create a Google Webmaster Tools account and add in your domain.  In this case, I added http://digiknow.typepad.com/analytics/

2. In Webmaster Tools, on the Verify screen, I selected “Upload an HTML file”. 

Download the file and keep it handy for step #6.

3. Login to TypePad and go to your blog, then the Design tab. 

4. Click on Saved (on the left navigation) and create a new advanced design.  In this case, I’m calling it “Google Verification”

5. Apply this template to your blog and go to the “Current” design information in the left navigation area.

6. Create a new index template.

For this you will need grab the file you downloaded from Google.  Then cut/paste the contents of the file into the Template Body and the file name into Output File.  I named the template “Google Verification” but you can call it anything you’d like.

7. Now if you go back to Webmaster Tools and click the Verify link, Google should see this new page and verify your account.

8. Now you can go back to TypePad and turn your old design back on completing this process.

Once you’ve verified your account, you will be able to view the searches surrounding your blog and submit a sitemap directly to Google.