Last month I attended a couple of Google Analytics classes and they explained that one of the most underused areas of Google Analytics is Intelligence. It was introduced in 2009 and yet many claim to not know about it or just don’t use it.

Intelligence is so smart that it keeps track of events behind the scenes, and when something unexpected happens it sets up an alert to let you know, “Hey, something occurred that you might want to investigate, even though you’ve already played 72 holes so far this week.” These alerts are on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. So when you don’t have time (should have used my 9 iron) to go in a view all the reports in Google Analytics, a quick glance in Intelligence can give you snapshot of any anomalies that have occurred. (more…)

Ardala Evans

Ardala is a Project Manager working with the client Services Team at Vertical Measures. She supervises the completion of the monthly tasks for the clients. She also works directly with clients to provide reporting on their projects and ranking reviews.

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Beginning with version 5 earlier this year, Google has been rolling out some major changes to Analytics. Features like multiple dashboards, event goal tracking, in-page analytics and more have made data analysis more robust and easier to track.

One of the newest features in the process of being rolled out is Flow Visualization. This new flowchart view provides a cleaner and much more intuitive way of depicting how visitors are moving through your site. Currently there are two Flow views: Visitors Flow and Goal Flow. Let’s take a look at how they’re used. (more…)

David Gould

David comes to the Vertical Measures team with over a decade of experience in online development. As the Web & Design Strategist, David is responsible for the look and functionality of the Vertical Measures website, blog and online applications. His programming skills allow him to complement form with function: with a strong technical background, he is able to combine innovative design with dynamic programming. David developed and maintains Vertical Measures’ proprietary project management software, EDWARD, and contributes to the design of the company’s visual branding materials.

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In my previous blog posts on Google Analytics, I have tried to show some of the simple ways that business owners can use the information available to see what is most relevant to them. How they can calculate their ROI on internet marketing, use site search to better understand their customers ,and evaluate the performance of their website content to make sales .

Unfortunately, all of these previous articles have relied heavily on tables and number crunching to understand your website, which perhaps isn’t everyone’s favorite subject. These rows upon rows of numbers and percentages may be scaring you away from getting highly actionable data to improve your website and marketing efforts.

However, there is a solution, and its name is ‘Motion Charts!’ Motion Charts are a very powerful tool within Google Analytics but unfortunately are pretty well hidden, so t hey don’t get the attention they deserve.

I admit that I don’t use Motion Charts as much as I should do, and tend to just look at the numbers, as this is quickest and easiest for me personally. However, because of the way the charts display their information, even if you are happy with tables of numbers, they can help make new connections between data and spark new ideas for improvements for a website. When people in the office suddenly became interested in what I was doing when they saw Motion Charts on my screen, I knew it was something powerful that could help many business owners.

Like I say, Motion Charts are pretty well hidden inside Analytics, and as the majority of people work their way through the left hand navigation through Visitors, Traffic Sources and Content, so they never even know they are there. Motion Charts aren’t so much a report, but instead a way to display the data. On any report that you are looking at you are given the option at the top of the page to ‘Visualize.’

Once you click to visualize you will be taken to a new screen that looks something like the following. I think you’ll agree it’s already more interesting than endless rows of numbers…

To improve this visualization further, click Play or drag the time slide-bar and you can really see the data come to life!

But what does this all mean and why is it useful? The graph is actually showing you 5 different pieces of data at any one time, all of which are completely customizable. In addition to the time slider and the x and y axis, you also have the color and size of each dot, which in the above example represent bounce rates and new visits respectively.

Being able to see all five pieces of data in one glance can help you see different connections and easily compare one dot to the next in terms of size, color and location on the graph.

So long as you set up the motion charts correctly and know what you’re looking at, these charts can take a lot of the pain out of understanding your Analytics. Depending on what each chart displays, you may be able to quickly diagnose problem areas or keywords of your website without ever having to see a table of numbers.

However, the key is in setting up the motion charts to display the information that is most important, which can be an art in itself. Obviously every website and business is different, but the following are some of the motion chart set ups that I find most useful, as well as what they show and how you can use this information:

Keywords

X axis; Pages / Visit

Y axis; Visits

Color: Goal Conversion Rate

Size; Bounce Rate

With this motion chart you should be easily able to see which keywords are performing best and worst for your website in terms of bringing sales and visitors to your pages. Small dots will have the lowest bounce rates and are likely to see more pages per visit, so should be located to the right hand side of the graph. Cold blue dots represent those keywords that are not converting to goal completions, whereas the warmer red the dots will be your higher converting, and most valuable keywords. Combine this information with each dots’ vertical placement on the graph and you can get a very good idea of how much good traffic leading to sales each keyword brings.

Top Content

X axis; Unique Pageviews

Y axis; Pageviews

Color: $ Index

Size; Bounce Rate

Much like the previous motion chart, this set up will show you which pieces of content are leading to conversions, and which have high bounce rates, obviously not enticing visitors to spend time on your website. The most viewed pieces of content will in the top right corner of the chart, and less popular content will be in the lower left hand corner. Again, warm and small dots are good, and large blue circles will signal underperforming content. If your business is able to get many small red dots in the top right hand corner of the chart, you know you are onto a very good thing!

All Traffic Sources

X axis; Pages/Visit

Y axis; Visits

Color: Per Visit Goal Value

Size; Bounce Rate

To keep everything logical, I try to leave the colors as representing the value of visitors and the size of each circle being the bounce rate for each motion chart, so you should again be able to find your most value traffic by small red dots on the graph. However, the flexibility of motion charts means that you are by no means restricted to this, I just prefer to keep things organized in this way, as this is the information I find most relevant in improving website conversions.

In addition to this, the Y axis in this example is most important as it shows the number of visits, i.e. the sample size, for the data being represented. A small red dot at the bottom of the graph may show just one visit that converted, but a small red dot at the top of the graph represents high numbers of very good traffic. As with everything in Google Analytics, the information that’s most important and what to look at for each website changes greatly for every business. However, with the visualize button and motion charts, even if you aren’t the best with tables and numbers, you should be able to grasp a better understanding of your traffic and what provides the most value to your bottom line. You can then use this information to know which activities to increase, and which areas or keywords to focus on to maximize profits.

James Constable

James is a Campaign Manager at Vertical Measures, looking at client’s Internet Marketing from a strategic viewpoint to get them the best possible results for their business needs and budget. His blog posts revolve around strategy, analytics and keyword selection.

Whether you’ve been working on your website marketing for years, or just starting to take it seriously for your business, there are few more powerful tools than Google Analytics (or another analytics software program such as Omniture or WebTrends). Last month we held an introductory webinar on the subject, which you can watch again, but with any tool this powerful its full potential cannot be covered in just one hour.

Analytics software is focused on telling you what visitors did on your site, and the clues that this information can provide ranges anywhere from pages that are underperforming, to ideas for new keywords to target. However, to get the most out of the information, you have to spend some time setting it up beyond simple installation. One of these areas that provide great insight is ‘Site Search’.

Site search is turned off by default because not every website has a search function, and those that do all work a little differently. If your website is currently lacking a search feature, we highly recommend adding one for reasons that will hopefully become obvious as we dissect the information that becomes available. When many of our clients first come to us they haven’t enabled this feature, but turning it on and configuring it is a couple of simple steps;

1. Go to Website Profile Settings – Currently set to ‘Don’t Track Site Search’ and ‘Edit’

2. In the new page click the radio button ‘Do track Site Search

3. Perform a search on your website and take a look at the URL to find your query parameter. It’ll be the url between the ‘?’ and ‘=’, probably a ‘s’, ‘q’, ‘search’ or ‘query’. Search for something unusual, not your company name or ‘search’. I searched my own name, and in the URL you can clearly and you see our website uses ‘s’.

4. If you also have categories, such as ‘Books’, “DVDs’ “clothes’ etc that people can search within, then set up the categories section in a similar fashion. Otherwise Save Changes and you’re done!

Once you have this set up a whole new realm of information becomes open to you with 6 new reports to analyze, pick apart and otherwise dissect and digest. Some highlights of these reports, and clues you can gain from them are as follows;

Overview

The overview is just a dashboard for your site search, so while useful, lets dig a little deeper!

Usage

Usage is again a little self evident in that this report tells you how often the search function on your website is being used, and it does this by way of a pie chart and graph over time. The actual figures involved in this report will depend on the industry you’re in, and the type of website that you are running, but anything over 20% would make me worry for most websites and make me ask such questions as;

• Why is the search volume so high?
• Has it changed over time or always been high?
• Are people having a problem with your sites navigation?
• Are your landing pages accurate for keywords, or do people need to search for what they want?

…and so on. Really try to see your website as someone visiting for the first time and without the ‘Curse of Knowledge’ in that you know where everything on your website is.

With this and any other report don’t forget to check out those tabs at the top for ‘Goals’ and ‘Ecommerce’ if you have these set up. This can tell you if those who use your search are more or less likely to convert into sales – maybe too many people are leaving your site because they can’t find what they want to buy, and are unwilling to use the search bar.

Search Terms

Search terms is how Google Analytics separates search queries on your website, and search queries that bring traffic to your site, which are classified as ‘Keywords’ in the Traffic Sources reports. In terms of SEO, this information may be the most important as it can tell you directly what your customers are looking for and if they were satisfied with what they found – look at exits %’s and time after search. This can give you inspiration for new keywords to target, new content to create, or new products to stock to keep your visitors happy!

Start Pages

The start pages report tells you the most common pages where visitors on your website enter a search query. You may wish to compare this information with that in your top content report to see which pages have disproportionally high number of searches, and then ask yourself;

• Does the page have difficult navigation? Why can’t visitors find what they want?
• What content are visitors expecting on certain pages?
• Are my landing pages not correctly aligned with their targeted keywords?

Drill down to each page to see the search terms used, as well as looking at the % of search exits, time after search etc, to see the value of each search term to your sites goals.

Destination Pages

The destination pages report tells you those pages which were most commonly found via a search term. This again can give you clues into some of the following questions;

• Which pages are your website visitors looking for but struggling to find?
• Why can’t your visitors find the pages they want? Are there navigation issues, or are you categorizing pages in subsections your visitors don’t think to check?
• Which pages do people want, and can you create more of them?

Catagories

If your website has different categories that can be searched in, and if set up correctly, this report can show those categories with the highest percentages of search queries. The information you can gather will again vary wildly, but you might want to ask yourself the following

• Why are some categories searched more than others?
• Is it in proportion to the volume of visitors in those categories?
• How can I alter the navigation of each category to reduce user search?

Trending

Like any Google Analytics report, the best information can be gathered by comparing how information changes over time, and the trends that take place. The trending report is therefore crucial in measuring the effect of changes that you make in response to any or all of the above questions. For example…

• Have the changes you made increased or decreased search volume?
• Are your visitors able to find what they want with just one search?
• Are visitors staying on your site longer after searching?

Once again this post can only barely scratch the surface of what all of this information can tell you about your website and its visitors. The better you can understand the two of them, and how they interact, the more successful your online business will be. Whether you have Site Search set up, or you follow these instructions to get started, let us know in the comment section below of any additional tips you pick up from the reports. Alternatively, if you would like to have us take a look, and see what we advise to get the most from your visitors, contact us and we’d love to help you succeed!

James Constable

James is a Campaign Manager at Vertical Measures, looking at client’s Internet Marketing from a strategic viewpoint to get them the best possible results for their business needs and budget. His blog posts revolve around strategy, analytics and keyword selection.

There are some great free tools out there that can provide valuable information about your website and your rankings in the search engines, but some of us just don’t have the time or patience to figure out how to read and interpret that information!  

Sarah Moraes

Sarah Moraes, Marketing Manager, heads the tactical planning and implementation of cross-platform marketing activities for Vertical Measures including; blogging, social media marketing, webinars, content marketing, email marketing and promotions. In addition, she published the Local Search Marketing for Business How-To-Guide, a part of the Vertical Measures How-To-Guide Series.

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