All of our online marketing training programmes are delivered by leading digital marketing experts. Today we've asked our Google Analytics lecturer Joanne Casey to give us her top three of most valuable features in Google Analytics.
Here Joanne shares her 3 goal tracking tips and where to find them in Google Analytics:
1. Always take the time to identify what the objective or goal of your website is, for example,
Is it that you want people to spend a lot of time on your website?
Maybe it’s that you want to generate enquires through your contact form or generate sales?
Once you've decided which, make sure you take your objectives and set them up as trackable goals in your Analytics account (goal set up can be found by clicking on Admin > Profiles > Goals).
There are 4 goals that you can segment your objectives under:
URL Destination,
Visit Duration,
Pages/Visit and
Event.
Once you have set up goals, sit back and get ready for some rich reporting to come through in your Analytics reports!
2. Always link your AdWords and Analytics accounts
Note - If you aren't sure how to do this see this article
As well as the benefit of having full data in Analytics to see how your AdWords traffic is performing, you can also track and view goals generated via AdWords, through your AdWords account.
Do this in a matter of clicks, by logging into your AdWords account, clicking onTools & Analysis in the top navigation, then Conversions, select Import from Google Analytics and yes, it’s that simple!
3. Once this is done use Conversion Optimiser
The real benefit of importing goals into AdWords is that when you reach 15 conversions in the last 30 days and you can move to Conversion Optimiser!
Check the availability of the conversion optimiser model for a particular campaign by selecting your campaign, click on the Settings tab, navigate down to Bidding and Budget >Bidding Option and select Focus on Conversion
What this means is that you can dictate a maximum CPA (Cost per Acquisition) bid and sit back and let Google use their predictive technology to fluctuate your bids for you - all towards driving as many conversions to your site as possible.
Google has introduced 4 new tools to help you track your social media marketing efforts, built directly into Google Analytics.
These 4 new reports aggregate key data points to help you see the complete picture of how social marketing and media affect your business. The 4 report tools focus on:
The Social reports allow you to analyse all of this information together and see the complete picture of how Social impacts your business.
The Pages Report tells you about the visitors that engage with your social media activities and track these visitors as they increasingly engage with, share, and discuss your content on your social networks. This report tells you which pages and content are being shared, where they're being shared, and how.
The Sources Report provides information about how your content is shared and how people come to your site. The report also explains how to understand how visitors from different social sources engage with your site.
The Conversions Report helps you to understand which shared content URLs are the entry points into your site and how the social media sources drive traffic to your site. Measuring the conversion and monetary value of this traffic will help you understand the impact of Social on your business.
The Social Plugins Report: Adding Social Plugin buttons to your site allows your users share content to social networks directly from your site. Your social plugin data shows you which content is being shared, and on which networks.
What do you think of this update? Is it helpful for your business and what tools do you currently use to track your performance on social media?
Back in late March, Google Analytics introduced social reports to its services. With it, you could see how much traffic social media brought and which sites visitors came from. It’s probably worth reminding people that this feature exists since it took a while for it to finally emerge, but not only has it rolled out to everyone, Google has added another new feature to social reports: trackbacks.
If you’re familiar with trackbacks and comments on sites like WordPress or Blogger, then you’ll have a pretty good idea as to how these work. If not, trackbacks show you the URL’s and post titles of those sites that have linked to you. The linkbacks happen automatically so once someone creates a link, Google will alert you to it.
The benefits of this is that you get extra insight into your traffic, seeing what content attracts links and tracking conversations that link to your content. This feature is part of Google’s social analytics and plays a part in determining what Google calls social impact. The company has said that four elements define a site’s social impact: Sources, conversations, pages and social plugins.
Sources looks at how people get to your site, conversions focuses on the monitory value of social traffic and how it impacts your business, pages highlights what pages and content are shared, where they’re being shared, and how, and social plugins shows you which content is being shared and which sites they’re being shared on.
Analytics pieces these factors together and displays a summary of social impact on its overview report through its social value graph, which compares the number and monetary value of all goal completions (if you’ve set them) versus those that resulted from social referrals.
After Facebook removed their discussions pages late last year, a new solution presented itself in the form of Forum for Pages, an app which allows pages to host their own discussion forums. It was a handy way for brand pages who have a large community manage and interact with their fans and back in December, around 10,000 different pages had the feature installed.
Now since all brand pages have updated to Timeline, interaction is harder as all user posts are now found in the one box located further down the page, so Forum for Pages have updated their product to reflect this change.
Available as an app, you can now add the Forum button as a tab on your page so that it’s more noticeable when users load up your page. The app is now available in twelve different languages, including Dutch, English, German, Italian and Russian, and you can integrate it into your normal website so that there will be crossover between the two pages.
The major change is that there’s now two versions of the app: the free version and the premium version. The premium version is a recent addition and now includes integration with Google Analytics, so you can tell which topics are the most popular, the ability to personalise the forum through a custom banner, no advertising (which features in the free version) and an RSS feed so that anyone can be alerted to any new updates or topic. The cost of the premium version ranges from $5 per month that allows you post less than 30 topics and $30 for the ability to post more than 300 topics.
The premium version is for larger pages and brands who want to engage with their community better as well as improve customer service on their page. Considering how interaction between fans and brand pages has changed, the inclusion of a forum does help foster discussion and gives a specialised area for users to interact with a brand, instead of the current Timeline format where posting a public message could see it being missed by everyone.
Being able to measure the impact and addition of social media on your site has been the holy grail for many marketers. It’s normally said that it improves the number of visits and interactions with your site, but exactly how much of an improvement it makes has been unclear. Until now, that is.
Google Analytics has unveiled a new set of social reports, designed to connect social media stats with business metrics and give you a clear picture of how exactly social media is benefiting your site.
- Identify the full value of traffic coming from social sites and measure how they lead to direct conversions or assist in future conversions.
- Understand social activities happening both on and off of your site to help you optimize user engagement and increase social key performance indicators (KPIs).
- Make better, more efficient data-driven decisions in your social media marketing programs.
The main change is that there is an overview report for social value, letting you see how much conversation value is generated from the different social media sites. The overview compares the number and monetary value of all your goal completions against those that resulted from social referrals, highlighting them as assisted social conversations and last interaction social conversations.
The conversations report allows you to see exactly how many conversions originate from the different social media sites. You can also see the monetary value they drive to your business, provided you have defined goals in Analytics itself, as that’s what required to see the data in question.
The major addition, however, is the social sources report which shows you engagement and conversion statistics for each social network so that you can see exactly how people are interacting with your content and whether any social media campaigns you’re running is having a desired effect.
Also the social plugins report effectively does the same as social value report except it shows you exactly how many times a page was shared via the Google +1 button or via Twitter. At the moment, it doesn’t seem that Analytics will measure the impact of the Facebook ‘like’ button or LinkedIn share, but you would hope that these would be added in eventually (provided Google doesn’t become petty and deliberately exclude them). The final addition is the activity stream which allows you to view exactly what people are saying when they link to your articles or pages. Currently this is limited to Google+ and those signed up to the company’s Social Data Hub such as Disqus, Blogger, Digg, Reddit and TypePad.
These new additions will be rolled out for all users over the coming weeks so if you don’t have it now, expect the additions to arrive sometime around mid-April at the latest.
The growth of Twitter and social media in general has made the need to measure and analyse accounts and their progress even greater for businesses. There are many analytical tools out there, like Optify and CoTweet, which aim to help businesses drive more traffic and leads but the number of analytical tools are as many as they are varied.
Twittie differentiates itself from the other analytical services by focusing on the location for its users, allowing them to keep up to date with new trends as well as their clients and competition.
The service, which will launch at the beginning of this month, analyses the results and development of your twitter account by tracking your followers, monitoring reactions to your tweets, links and tags and checks your influence in relation to your competitors.
The service also offers suggestions based on this to help tailor your tweets towards your target market and make them more effective. The site gathers data about when your followers are online so that you will know the best times to tweet at the best time, resulting in greater engagement with your followers.
Currently the service focuses on the British and Polish market but it will be introduced to other areas such as Germany, Spain and the US in the next few months.
Hopefully when the service launches properly, the quality will be far greater than their promotional video which appears to be a text-to-speech video, although the company is Polish so perhaps it’s a little unfair to dwell on it too much.
While many brands are on a clear race for Likes, those smart Facebook Page owners will be looking beyond the number of Likes on the side of their Page and into more detailed analytics that show them how their Page is performing, and where they stand in relation to their competitors. Facebook itself offers a comprehensive analytics dashboard that tells you how your Page is performing, and I wanted to take a look at some of the tips for using this, as well as other sites that can help you get more out of your insights. As with all form of analytics, remember that the magic only really comes when you make actions off the back of the data, and don’t fall into analytics overload.
See what you did right/wrong
Under the Users dashboard in Facebook, you can access a simple graph that tells you how many new Likes you’re getting each day, as well as the number of Unlikes. This is incredibly valuable information as it allows you to see what you’re doing that’s working for you on your Page, or not working. This is useful if you click into the graph when you see an unusual pattern such as a sudden increase in the number of Unlikes. Look for what you might have done on that day that turned people off. Did you post too often, did a competition end, did you post irrelevant content? Try and find a pattern here and make sure you don’t keep doing the same thing!
Optimise your traffic referrers
Also within the Users dashboard in Facebook Insights, you can see the external traffic drivers to your Page. You should pay attention to these to see if you can optimise sites that are driving you traffic, to get even better results. You should also be looking at those sites that are referring traffic, but maybe not as much as you hoped. If you’re running a promotion on another site for example, or your own site, and the traffic isn’t coming through, you might need to look at how you’re enticing people through, or how prominent the link is. The external referrers are incredibly important for growing your fans organically so make sure this activity is optimised.
Are your fans actually active?
If you’re investing in a campaign to drive up the fans on your Page, you should always be looking at whether these fans are actually active, or whether they’re just contributing to an idle number of Likes. This is easily accessed with Facebook Insights and can be tracked over daily, weekly, or monthly users. If this number isn’t where you’d expect it to be, look at what you can do to drive interaction or, more importantly, bring the right kind of fans into your Page.
Implement on-click tagging
While Facebook’s own insights tell you a lot about how fans are performing on your Page, you can get a lot more in-depth by combining with your own analytics package. By implementing on-click tagging for a Facebook app for example, you can get a complete overview of how the app is performing. Through this you can effectively see drop-off rates, such as the amount of people that entered their email address vs the amount of people that landed on this Page. If you’re getting high dropoff rates at certain points, maybe you’re asking for too much information or the page isn’t very user friendly and so you’re losing the conversion.
Track against competitors
Social Bakers is a great site for getting free Facebook stats worldwide, as well as those that apply more specifically to you. If you want to see how many Likes you’re getting compared to your competitors, perhaps for benchmarking before a new campaign, you can do this easily through Social Bakers. Simply click onto ‘Pages’ at the top, then filter by country and category, to view the Page breakdown by industry. As well as looking at the overall number of fans, you can also look at the rate of growth, to see if a new promotion is working well for them in terms of driving numbers to Facebook. This information is also important for your own Facebook Page, to get a quick overview of how quickly you’re driving fans :
Get Insights for your own site
A lesser known feature in Facebook Insights, is the ability to track analytics for your own website. This allows you to see how content is being shared throughout your site, such as the number of Likes you’re getting, or links that are being shared through Facebook. Here you can choose who can view that information, setting this either for your profile or a particular Page. You can also access additional insights such as how many impressions a particular link or content has gained through Facebook. This is great information to show you how your content is performing socially and you can optimise off the back of it, by seeing the type of content that is getting shared most and trying to replicate it :
If you are like me and you use social media on a regular basis you are probably obsessed with stats from your various different networks, sites, blogs and sharing tools. Finding out all those stats is usually quite a manual process of logging in and out of several accounts and most people I know check their Google Analytics account about 10 times a day alone. I’ve always craved a dashboard that would pull in all that information in to one central hub where I could get a quick overview of all the my activity online and Twenty Feet seem to have just launched that tool. You’ll need to do a little bit of manual work at the start connecting up all your various accounts but that should only take about 10 minutes and once done you’ll have simplified your life significantly and you can kiss goodbye to all the logging in and out of accounts again. It’s a great new service and the level of functionality and customization for a site still in BETA is very impressive…
Google Analytics
Goes in to a good amount of detail here and will give you a good look at traffic for the last week and some of your other headline stats. If you need more detail on tracking you’ll still need to log in to Google Analytics itself but perfect way of checking for an unusual spikes in traffic etc.
Facebook Pages Info
This is essentially the same data that you can get within Facebook itself but the beauty here is that it is all built in to one dashboard along with all your other stats. You can also add multiple Facebook accounts which is especially useful for agencies and brands managing a few pages.
Twitter Stats
The best thing about the Twitter stats is that they can show how many Retweets and interaction you are getting across your various Twitter accounts (it also lets you track multiple accounts). The stats here are simple enough but it does help give you a good overview about just how your content is spreading online.
Bit.ly
It’s very hard to keep a track of links you share online but if you use Bit.ly you can see exactly what happens to all your links. You’ll have to set up an account on bit.ly itself but once you do you can see every single click on the links, where those clicks happened, when they happened and watch out for any spikes of useful content you might have shared.
Youtube
Youtube videos have a funny habit of blowing up and getting a load of views, comments or ratings without you even noticing it because most people don’t spend much time looking at their stats there. With this tool within the dashboard you will pick up spikes in your videos within hours.
One Beautiful Dashboard
Once all the work has been done and you have tailored all your reports to be delivered the way you want them you can simply add them in to your dashboard so as soon as you come back to the site you don’t have to go flicking around your various social media statistics. It is streamlined, simply designed and gives you an instant snapshot of what you are looking for. It’s data presented in a way where you can quickly see spikes of activity and choose to do something about it if needed.
The Verdict?
It’s a great idea and something that many of us have been crying out for now for a long time. Although the content is excellent the site is still very slow at the moment and it shows that it is in BETA but you can expect that to get better over time. It takes them a while to get the feeds at the moment but that will hopefully get faster. If they do sort out the speed issues then I can see people using this on a daily basis because it will save everybody time and cut out all that flicking between accounts. You can check out Twenty Feet here. Here is a good video with the founder that I spotted on Scoble’s blog…
Most people struggle to manage one Facebook page or profile but there are many businesses, agencies, publishers, freelancers and brands who have to manage multiple pages and this post is dedicated to you. Most good campaigns live or die by the data and analytics that they produce and I wanted to bring together a list of the best ways of tracking the data on Facebook. You can of course use Facebook’s own analytics and they are sure to improve over time but this list gives you a mixture of serious business tools, some quick research aids and some more light hearted fun tools. Make sure to add any that I have missed to the comments and enjoy this list of Facebook analytics options…
Webtrends
Might as well start the list off with the most expensive one on the list and this solution from Webtrends is going to set you back some serious cash. Mostly used by medium to large brands and agencies you can drill down in to some serious detail but you will need some volume to find it in any way useful.
Real Time Analytics
So you have like buttons on your website but you are not sure how they are converting and what the traffic is doing? You’ll need a developer to help you implement this or at least a little technical knowledge but as they say it gives you “access to real-time analytics to optimize Like buttons across both your site and on Facebook.” You can read more about implementing it here.
This one is completely free to use and it used to be called Facebakers until the big bad lawyers came along and asked them to change their name. You do have to connect your account using Facebook connect to unlock some of the features but the good news is that there is a whole wealth of free information in here including users per country, city, by brand and growth figures.
Wildfire App
This is a simple little app from Wildfire who allow you to compare up to 3 Facebook pages and it’s a great way of tracking competitors and it even allows you to set up alerts around different spikes in traffic. You can of course pay to unlock even more features.
Facebook Grader
You may have seen the Grader range of products for websites and other web products and this is their version for Facebook. They give you a score out of 100 and also tell you where you rank among the other pages that have been ranked. This services doesn’t really offer you much insight but it does give you a quick overview of where your own page or your competitors rank.
How Much Is Your Page Worth?
I add this one to the list in a joking way because there is no way that you could ever use an automated tool to calculate the real value of a Facebook page and there wouldn’t be a value or buyer for your page. It is however a little harmless fun to calculate how much your Facebook page is worth. Apparently somebody would pay us 14k for ours. Haha where is that person??
I always get a lot of questions about business blogging and how people can improve their own blogs or just get started. There are 100s of posts out there including a few of our own but I wanted to look at things from a slightly higher level today and see what you can do to create a really remarkable blog. None of these tips are going to pay off overnight and none will turn your blog in to a massive hit without hard work but they do work and they are important if you are really serious about this. Rather than thinking everything on this list is going to deliver results by the end of the month look at the items on here and try and implement them over the course of a full year because that is when you will really see the value…
Write Your Posts On A Train Or Plane
You obviously can’t jump on a plane or train every time you need to write a blog post but all the great posts I write are when I am offline and only have a text editor in front of me. When I am online writing a blog post I’ll be distracted every couple of minutes and pop in and out of email, Twitter and Facebook which means that even though my blog post is taking hours to write the quality and concentration are just not there. Try switching the online world off and just concentrating on nothing but your blog post. You’ll be stunned by the results you achieve.
Don’t Try And Break News
It’s often tempting to try and compete with sites out there who break news within your niche but it doesn’t work. We can’t compete with the likes of The Next Web, Mashable or Techcrunch because they have teams of professionally paid writers whose main job is to break news. They spend their time on RSS, Twitter and chasing stories so as they can be the first to break news. Where you can compete is by adding insight to the latest news and delving behind the story. So rather than telling people that Facebook have launched new comments we will give you the analysis and show what it means for your own business.
Sell Your Blog Like A Book
I picked up 2 books in the airport this morning. I only had 2 minutes to make the purchase so I ended up going for the books that stood out to me from a design perspective and told me exactly what they were about on the cover. You need to think of your blog in exactly the same way and package it up like a book. The chances are people will only flick on to your blog for a couple of seconds before deciding if they are going to read it. Much like I didn’t have time to read blurbs or the first page of the book your potential readers probably won’t read your “about” section or any of your posts. They’ll scan over your blog and see if they like the design, the layout and the title of your post. If you have all of those things right they’ll read on, if you don’t they’ll move on.
Read Everything You Can Find
When I am not working or writing on the blog I am reading. When I wake up in the morning I read blog posts. When I am in a queue I read blogs. Waiting on a bus I’ll be reading and before going to bed at night I’ll be reading the work of others. Your own blog is never going to be good unless you absorb the work of others and know your industry inside out. Not only will you become more knowledgable but you’ll also get some great inspiration for your own blog posts and think of angles you never would otherwise. The big popular blogs are not always the best place to start because plenty of people are writing amazing content out there that you have never heard of before but isn’t getting found so look for the niche stuff. Make it your job to find the best content and read it as much as you possibly can.
Network Your Ass Off
Most of you know how to do this already. It’s a lot of hard work and the benefits are not always apparent but networking is the way to make your blog truly remarkable and build an audience. Use tools like Twitter and Facebook. Leave comments on other blogs. Speak at events. Attend events within your niche. Email people within your niche. Strike up relationships and generally increase the size of your network. None of this is going to bring people to your blog overnight but showing that you know your stuff on other sites and creating a network of people who trust your word on a subject within your niche is one of the most important things you can do as a blog owner.
Don’t Let Critisism Influence Your Writing
95% of people who read your blog will love it and thank you for the great content you are producing and the ideas you are sharing. No matter how helpful or accurate your blog is though 5% will always have something bad to say. It’s human nature and it will never change. Some people find it very hard to take because they find it personal, an attack on the work they have put hours of their life in to. You shouldn’t think like that. It’s right that people should disagree with your way of thinking and challenge you. The most important thing to do is to not let those 5% shape what you would write in the future and to keep writing what YOU think.
Lay Your Blog Out Like A Newspaper
When I pick up a copy of The Sunday Time I know exactly where everything is. The sections are always the same and the way the articles and photos are spread out on the pages rarely changes. Newspapers are very good at presenting the content to you in the way you would expect it to be delivered. Once you have settled on your final blog design you need to keep all your posts as uniform as possible. Have a look over some of our posts and you’ll pretty much see an image in same place and the posts broken in to sections with a title for each section. We never move away from that format because people are used to it and it allows them to scan articles like this for the bits that they need. Layout might seem like a small enough thing but think of all the big blogs you read and think about how standardized their layout is.
Write Stuff That You Shouldn’t Write
There are times when I’m writing a post and I think to myself “I shouldn’t really be saying that” and think about deleting it. More often than not though I’ll leave it in because a blog is about opinions and there is no point holding back. Sure you might get some bad feedback or people disagreeing with you in the comments but I’d always publish 90% of the things you think you shouldn’t. At the end of the day there are 100s of people out there writing about the same stuff and playing it safe so having your own opinions is one way of standing out from the crowd.
Set Targets
We have targets for this blog every month. Numbers of RSS subscribers, number of posts, number of unique visits, email subscribers and so on. They are in a nice little spreadsheet and they get updated once a quarter. I know you probably think that because we are a business we need to do that but I have always done the same on personal blogs as it’s a great way of looking at the bigger picture. I know some people have personal blogs and couldn’t care less about traffic or hitting targets but if you want to grow your blog get in to the habit of setting yourself targets. Where do you want to be by the summer? Could you double the size of your blog by this time next year? Think long term rather than short term.
Learn Google Analytics Properly
You probably have a good basic understanding of your stats and look at them every day to see how your traffic is growing but that is only scratching the surface. I would suggest spending half a day learning Google Analytics properly using their conversion University (totally free). You’ll start to pick up trends and spot content on your blog which is working well against content that just doesn’t get much of a reaction.
Get A Marketing Strategy
Your blog as it is at the moment is barely not going to be found. You are competing against millions of other blogs, news sites, content farms, Twitter and every other site on the web also screaming out for attention. You could be creating the most amazing content in the world but without a marketing strategy it’s never going to be found. I’ve written plenty of posts here in the past about drivingtraffic to your blog that you can use as a reference. Don’t just make it up as you go along but instead sit down and put a bit of thought in to your marketing plan and even get it down on paper.
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Google has introduced 4 new tools to help you track your social media marketing efforts, built directly into Google Analytics.
If you are like me and you use social media on a regular basis you are probably obsessed with stats from your various different networks, sites, blogs and sharing tools. Finding out all those stats is usually quite a manual process of logging in and out of several accounts and most people I know check their Google Analytics account about 10 times a day alone. I’ve always craved a dashboard that would pull in all that information in to one central hub where I could get a quick overview of all the my activity online and 
Most people struggle to manage one Facebook page or profile but there are many businesses, agencies, publishers, freelancers and brands who have to manage multiple pages and this post is dedicated to you. Most good campaigns live or die by the data and analytics that they produce and I wanted to bring together a list of the best ways of tracking the data on Facebook. You can of course use Facebook’s own analytics and they are sure to improve over time but this list gives you a mixture of serious business tools, some quick research aids and some more light hearted fun tools. Make sure to add any that I have missed to the comments and enjoy this list of Facebook analytics options…
I always get a lot of questions about business blogging and how people can improve their own blogs or just get started. There are 100s of posts out there including a 
