Analytics Category

Key Website Statistics in Google Analytics

2012-11-30T15:18:03+13:00

Google Analytics is a very powerful reporting tool with a huge amount of information that can tell you how many visits your website gets, where they are coming from and what they are doing when they get there.

Google Analytics statistics you might overlook.

2012-11-24T14:03:00+13:00

Google Analytics is a powerful reporting tool that provides most of the data a business might need to see if their web marketing efforts are working.

How to get Google Analytics reports sent to your inbox each month

2012-11-23T14:09:00+13:00

If you don't want to have to remember to login to your Google Analytics dashboard on a regular basis, you can set up reports to be emailed to you on a regular basis.

Here's how to do it.

1. Login to Google Analytics

2. From the Audience Overview screen, click on 'Email' located in the grey bar just underneath the "Audience Overview" title.

3. In the screen that pops up:

Enter the email address you want to receive the reports
Click the drop- down next to attachments and pick the format you want to receive them in - I prefer PDFs in these cases
Select how often you want to recieve them and on what day
In the advanced options you can add a message such as "Here's your monthly Audience Overview report from Google analytics"
Click on Send

If you want other reports such as Traffic Sources, navigate to the report you want (from the Google Analytics menu) as you would to view the report on screen, and follow the same process.

If you have custom reports setup, you can do the same thing also.

How to tell if you have Google Analytics installed

2012-11-22T14:12:00+13:00

Sometimes we'll ask someone if they have Google Analytics installed but they don't know if they do or not.

This isn't as strange as it seems, it may have been installed by the web developer when the site was built, but because no one has never checked the stats, it's been forgotten about.

To tell if you have analytics installed you need to view the html 'source' of your page. In most browsers you can do this by clicking the right mouse button while you have your website displayed and selecting 'View Source', 'View Page Source' or 'Source' from the menu.

You'll get a screen full of code which probably looks a bit scary at first, but you only need to scroll down until you see something that starts with a line that looks like this:

"script type="text/javascript">var _gaq = _gaq | | [ ];_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-xxxxxx-x']) ;_gaq.push(['_trackPageview'])......."

This is the Google Analytics tracking code.

Of course having this installed, and remembering what account it has been set up on is two different things.

If you've lost the account name (ie the email address) it was set up on, you may have to get it re-installed.

Conversion Rates – what are they and how do you report conversions in Google Analytics?

2012-11-18T14:05:00+13:00

Your website conversion rate is a simple calculation that says "of the people coming to my site, how many take the action I want?"

To calculate conversion rate take the number of goals achieved and divide by total visits. So if you get 100 visits to your site, and only 3 take the action you want:

3 divided by 100, then multiplied by 100 to get a percentage, equals 3%.

If you get 832 visits to your site in a given period, and 45 download your e-book and 17 fill in your contact form:

Conversion rate for ebook: (45 / 832) x 100 = 5.4%
Conversion rate for contact: (17 / 832) x 100 = 2.0 %

These numbers might look low, but they are quite typical!

In most cases, the number of visits is an easy figure to obtain as every website statistical reporting tool will give you this figure.

The 'take action' part, is more difficult, because you require some kind of trigger that tells your reporting tool to take note that it's happened.

Conversion data in Google Analytics

Google Analytics reports conversions in three ways:

Acheivement of a goal which can be a destination url like a thank you page, or an event like clicking on download. You can use time on site and pages per visit also
E-commerce activity
Multi-Channel Funnels, which report on how your traffic sources work together to create conversions.

Having GA report this information means you can filter the report by different segments, such as search traffic and referral sources.

Setting up Google Analytics to Report Conversions

Setting up conversion reporting in Analytics is particularly important if you are running Adwords campaigns, as this information can be feed back into Adwords to calculate very specific ROI's for individual ads and keywords.

But even if you aren't running Adwords or something similar, it is much more important to know the number of sales or leads your received, than the number of visitors you got.

1.Setting up Goal conversions

Goals are set up via the Admin section of Google Analytics

This is probably the easiest to set up because you just define the goal and away you go.

If you are a non-commerce site you can set up a page such as your contact thank you page as a goal.

You can also setup events as goals, say clicking on a download or subscribe button.

Events need to have tracking code added to your website so you might need your web developer to do this for you, but goal urls are easy to set up if you can identify a specific end page that the visitor will see after performing an action.

ECommerce tracking

This requires a bit more setup because more complext tracking needs to be added to your site.
Although you can tell how many sales your site is generating from your order information, adding this tracking will give you information about which traffic sources (eg social media vs search) and keywords are leading to sales.

You will probably need to get your web developer to do this for you, or see this detailed step by step guides to setting up ECommerce Tracking in Google Analytics

Multi Channel Funnels

Multi Channel Funnels needs goals and/or ecommerce tracking set up to work.

It goes beyond simple conversion measures to show you other customer interactions that occurred before the one immediately prior to purchasing from you. This will tell you how the other channels contributed to the final purchase or action, such as how many touchpoints the customer used before a conversion.

Find out more about Multi Channel Funnels

With conversion tracking in place, it makes it much easier to see areas where potential sales are lost, and calculate return on marketing activities such as Adwords and SEO.

What are bounce rates and how do I reduce them?

2011-08-21T14:47:00+12:00

Your website's 'bounce rate' relates to the percentage of visitors that hit your website (or a page) and do not visit any other page. So it's a single-page visit.

This is an indication of the quality of your content and how well it matches what your visitors were looking for.

Because of the way people surf for information, it's hard to get a bounce rate much below 20%.

Anything under 30% we don't worry much about.
Anything over 40% we'd look at to check that it's reasonable that visitors go to that page and away again.
Anything over 60% is cause for concern, so we'd check these pages and see if we can improve them

What do I do about high bounce rates?

To reduce bounce rates, it's more useful to look at individual pages rather than the whole site

Check the search keywords used that landed people on the page, then see if the content on the page spoke to the need expressed in the search phrase.
Check the content on the page to see if there is a clear, strong call to action

What are exit rates?

The percentage of visitors that leave your site from a given page, based on the number of visits to that page. A visitor who exits from a page might have visited other pages on your site, but just exited on that specific page.

Think about what the preferred path through your site is and whether the exit page is where you want people to be leaving from (like the order or registration confirmation page).

If visitors are exiting on pages that are half way through your sales funnel or in other words at a point that they are unlikely to have taken an action, it would pay you to review these pages and see if there is opportunity for improvement (similar to reducing bounce rates)

How can I have 100% bounce rate with 20% exit rate?

Bounce rates indicate a single-page visits. Exit rates indicate multi-page visits. But in some ways a percentage is misleading because it doesn't tell you the actual numbers. For those pages with 100% bounce rates, Google Analytics will tell you how many visits this was by looking at the Top Landing Page report.

Why do I have visits with a duration of zero seconds in Google Analytics

2011-06-26T13:43:00+12:00

What does it mean when your analytics report is telling you that a visit to your website was of a duration of zero seconds?

It's all because of the way Google tracks visitor behaviour.

Google Analytics tracks visits to the pages on your site by using cookies triggered by code on every page being tracked.

When a visitor goes to a page, it triggers this code and Google registers it as a visit, along with other data such as the time they arrived there.

If they go to another page on your site, the code on that page will trigger another record, and the time that the visitor arrived at the next page – which is effectively the time they left the first one.

The difference between the two events (the time they arrived and the time they left) is used to calculate the time spent on that first page.

But if the visitor only visited one page then left the site then there is no second event for Google Analytics to record and use to calculate the time difference so, single page visits can show up as having 'zero' duration.

This article "Time On Site & Bounce Rate: Get the real numbers in Google Analytics" includes a script snippet to add to your site if want to resolve this issue.

Strange referring sites appearing in Google Analytics

2011-06-02T13:40:00+12:00

This is what is known as Referral Spam.

Referral spam will show up as strange site address's in your Google Analyics reports under Traffic Sources.

Typically you can recognise them by referring sites listed that have all or one of the following:

A url with a phrase to do with making money online, or hosting or trading
A url that may or may not include a "tiny url"
the domain name is not one you recognise and would not be one that has or would ever have a link to your site from. Dodgy SEO's will register your site on "1000's" of directories and sites not related to yours so it could be one of those - but they don't provide any benefit anyway.
Recently we've seen one that is a domain name with a european country code (illustrated below)

What causes this referral spam ?

Referral spam or log spam is fake traffic generated by websites that are not related to your own.

These websites use programs that send fake visitors to their site - but Google thinks these fake visitors came to your site.

So why should you care?

The underhand purpose is to increase the referral site's search engine ranking so they appear on the first page of Google.

If you've ever heard of Black Hat SEO - this is a Black Hat technique. One that manipulates results and perverts the intention of Google which is to help users find quality sites.

It is unethical and a form of cheating. It is not clever or part of the game and, like email spam, it gets in the way of everyone else because it makes getting decent search results harder.

What can I do about it?

Don't worry too much about it because it isn't likely to be a direct attack on your site. It is not a reflection on your site or it's security.

Do NOT, out of curiousity, go and visit the site to see who it is. That just serves their purpose.

You can ignore it if it the numbers aren't particularly high.

There are technical ways to block it if you are really serious about it - you should talk to your web developer/technical support on how to do it because the solution depends on your setup.

You can setup filters in Google Analytics to filter them out if you are concerned about what it is doing to your stats. But actual numbers mean little in website analytics anyway because of the number of random factors that can pervert the accuracy.

This is why we recommend focusing on trends and REAL results like leads and sales.

And please, don't be tempted to contribute to the problem by engaging anyone who includes these kind of tactics for short term gain.

Google Analytics - why are there keywords with zero visits.

2010-10-28T09:08:00+13:00

In Google Analytics, scroll to the bottom of the list of keywords used by visitors to your site (found under traffic sources).

You will often see keywords that have 'zero' number of vists.

Why is this?

Google Analytics tracks visitor behaviour within a specific visit or 'session'. If they come and go to and from your website within that 30 minutes, they will not count them as separate visits, but part of the same visit.

For instance:

I search for 'web design' and click on a link to the Essentee website.
I look around for a few minutes and then leave, perhaps looking at other websites.
5 minutes later I search using another term, say 'web packages', and again click on a link to the Essentee site

This will be counted as 1 visit.

Keyword phrases and variations

In the above scenario, I used two keyword phrases that lead me to the Essentee site.

One would register the visit, so assuming no one else used that search term there would be a 1 next to it.

The other keyword (most likely the second one) would already have had the visit counted and does not get counted again because it was in the same session - so there would be a 0 next to it.

Five Facts you have to know about your website

2010-03-04T13:42:00+13:00

Ask yourself these five questions - the answers contain opportunities for more business!

1. How many visitors do I get?

This is one of the most important pieces of information you have.

The 'conversion rate' (how many people take the action you want) for web marketing starts at around 3%, so if you want one contact a day from your website, your starting visitor number goal should be 30 a day. If you are getting a good number of visitors, you could decide to focus on increasing the number that contact you, make a purchase or sign up for your newsletter.

If you know how many visits your site gets, then you know whether to focus your marketing efforts on getting more visitors or increasing the conversion rate. This will mean more bang for your marketing buck!

Where are they coming from?

Your web reporting tool should break down your visitors into three sources:
- Direct visits
- Referral sites
- Search engines (eg Google)
Direct visits are those people who have you book marked or type your website address directly into their browser. So these people already 'know' you or have been referred to you. An indication of repeat customers or referral business at work

Referral sites. This shows your back-links in action. It will tell you how many of your visitors came from yellow pages, Finda, Facebook and other sites you have links on.

Search engines. We all know that people turn to the search engines first to find what they're looking for, so this is an important statistic. People coming to your site from Google etc are likely to be your 'new' business prospects. You'll have to weed out the people that searched for you by name.

You want to increase the number of visitors that come from the search engines (first) and referral sites (second) as this most likely represents new business for you.
What keywords are they using?

Keywords and phrases are critical. You have to know what words your visitors are using to find you. Make sure those words are in your content so you are giving them what they are looking for.

If you have an Ad Words account, you can also research other keywords to use and how many people search for those words. For example if you sell air conditioners, you could find out that there are an average of 12,100 searches for "air conditioning" each month (in New Zealand). And that there were 14,88 for "cooling" and 22,200 for "heat pump". You can then make sure all those phrases are used in your content, your tags etc.
What is my most popular content?

Which pages are doing all the work for you? Which ones are a waste of real estate? Apart from keywords, the popular content tells you what people are interested in, so you can make sure that content is as compelling and persuasive as possible.

Don't spend time tweaking the content that no one is looking at!
What's my conversion rate?

You need to know how many of the visits to your site are converting to a sale. This can be tricky, because sometimes people might visit you several times before filling in a contact form, calling you or making an online purchase.

Measuring conversion rates can be hard. If you want people to contact you, and your website has your phone number or email address details in the header or footer for example, it is visible from anywhere in the site. This means that you don't know what visitors were looking at or which page resulted in a decision to contact you.

In these situations, we recommend at the minimum a unique phone number that is only published on the website, so its possible to get clear referral numbers. Unfortunately many businesses (especially small) are understandably reluctant to spend the extra money.
Bonus question: What's my bounce rate?

This measure is very useful for improving your site's performance.

The bounce rate is the number of visitors that land on a site or page and leave again straight away.

So if a particular page gets 60 visits, and has a 75% bounce rate, it means that 60 people landed on that page (ie came into your site on that page) and 45 of them left again straight away. Unless it's a campaign and call to action on a single page, this is not a good thing because it suggests they didn't find what they were looking for on that page.

For more on this, see our article What are bounce rates and how do I reduce them?
More important Bonus question: What am I going to do about it?