The 65th edition of our podcast brings you week #26 from the original 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan. This video gives some web log analysis tips.

The recording is taken from our original 2007 seminar. At the time it sold for £399 as part of our 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan home study package. Now, for the first time we’re giving it away for free via our internet marketing podcast.

Why are we giving all this great video content away for free?

Although these videos still offer a lot of great tips, internet marketing methods change over time. We’re going to be launching a brand new version of the plan soon, and we’re sure that by sharing these original video recordings for free, you’ll be persuaded to jump on-board when the new paid-for version launches! Stay tuned to our newsletter to find out more.

The 35th edition of our podcast brings you week #6 from the original 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan. This video looks at web analytics software.

The recording is taken from our original 2007 seminar. At the time it sold for £399 as part of our 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan home study package. Now, for the first time we’re giving it away for free via our internet marketing podcast.

Why are we giving all this great video content away for free?

Although these videos still offer a lot of great tips, internet marketing methods change over time. We’re going to be launching a brand new version of the plan soon, and we’re sure that by sharing these original video recordings for free, you’ll be persuaded to jump on-board when the new paid-for version launches! Stay tuned to our newsletter to find out more.

The audio version of our interview about Google Analytics with Timothy Seward is only available to Inner Circle members. If you’re already a member, click here to listen to the interview now.

Timothy Seward

DB Thank you for joining me. I’ll tell you what; could I possibly ask you to begin by telling me a little bit about your background and a little bit about ROI Revolution?

TS Well, basically my background is in business. Several years ago I started and developed a Wholesale Distribution company serving the automotive industry in the United States. Basically we wholesaled auto and truck accessory parts to retailers and that was something that I was involved in until the late 90s.

I started the company and built it up to almost sixty employees and one of the things that we had developed over the years in business was a really pretty robust information architecture for our company. We got to the point where we had many of our telephone sales people entering orders in Real Time in a 25 user Novel network to kind of date myself a little bit and my partner and I were always able to get Real Time data on sales and gross profit and customer profitability and so forth on a daily basis so we used information to our advantage. In the late 90s I got a buy out on that business.

I got a buy out opportunity and I took it and was so fascinated with how technology was such a strategic advantage to me in that previous business, I decided to actually go back to school and get a degree in Computer Science. So I did that, went back to school full-time actually for almost four years and graduated.

In late 2001, I decided to start a web development company. At that time the seller that had introduced me to the web development industry showed me a really neat tool for tracking websites; it’s called WebTrends, many of you may be familiar with that programme.

It’s the original programme for tracking marketing campaigns and for tracking efforts on a website and really got fascinated with the whole measurement aspect, keeping in mind that I was very much of a numbers type of person from my previous business. So fast forward a couple of years later.

We discovered Urchin and found it to be even faster and more robust than the WebTrends software and decided to switch from WebTrends to Urchin and that was in 2004. In early 2005 Google bought the company Urchin Software’s 30-35 person San Diego, a California based company and they moved the whole team up to Mountain View, California.

Google Headquarters and Google took a service that Urchin was providing called Urchin 6 On Demand that was essentially a hosted version of the their flagship web set analytics package and reduced the price immediately once they bought the company from $6000 a year to $2,400 dollars a year.

We were invited to join Google in promoting Urchin Software and Urchin Services itself in July of 2005. In August our company and six other companies from around the world were the first seven companies to actually get invited by Google and get trained in this and so forth, and then as many of you know on 15 November 2005, Google took the Urchin 6 product and re-branded it, called it Google Analytics.

They didn’t take away any of the functionality, in fact added a few reports over the first twelve months or so and took what used to be a $6,000 a year programme and made it completely free and re-branded it as Google Analytics and so the rest is history so to speak. That’s my background in a real quick nutshell but Google; I’m sure we’re probably be talking about this a little later just to bring everybody up.

Google just launched their new design a complete rework of the design and interface and some other nice features. So Google is now in its second. Google Analytics is in its second generation and is just a fantastic programme for helping website owners track their marketing efforts online and also track their traffic, so they can learn how to get their traffic to convert better.

DB Right okay, thank you, I appreciate you sharing that. So was Urchin the leading tracking software at that time?

TS At the time and I think we’re talking about prior to becoming Google Analytics. Urchin Software was in the Urchin service was in 20% of the Fortune 500 and was used by tens of thousands of users worldwide, I don’t have the exact figures, Google is very private about the exact figures but I know that it was one of the most predominant packages on the market and now with it being re-branded in November 2005 and made completely free between Google Analytics and Urchin Software, which we still sell today.

There’s a lot of mini companies and particularly Government agencies that buy Urchin software because of its great ability to analyse log files but between the two I would say, it would have to be the most predominant website analytics package or group of packages on the market today.

DB So going back to the very basics for listeners, why should businesses track their website visitors?

TS Sure absolutely. Well, there’s a variety of ways. Can we talk about it from a marketing angle? Because…

DB Yeah absolutely. I appreciate it’s a really wide question there but there are still quite a few smaller businesses out there, perhaps larger businesses that aren’t actually looking at any tracking data they’re getting from their website, so I was wondering if you could just provide a brief overview of the benefits of receiving and analysing that data?

TS Absolutely, and so the reason I’d like to look at it from a marketing standpoint that question, is because we’ll assume that you’re spending money to generate traffic. You’re spending money to get people to come to your site.

DB Right.

TS And if we use that as a starting point then what Google Analytics helps people do, what website tracking software in general will help folks do, is essentially number one, learn a little bit more about the visitors who come to their site. How they get to the site. What search engine brought them to the site, what keywords were typed into that search engine that helped them find the site, and that’s from a natural perspective.

From a paid perspective if the website owner is spending money on Google advertising, on some banner ads, on any kind of email initiatives and they’re spending money to get this traffic sent to the site. Wouldn’t it be nice to know how that traffic is faring. Whether the traffic is converting and making the website owner much money, or whether it’s just hitting one of the pages and just bouncing right out.

DB Right.

TS So essentially, it helps you to, as a website owner, to fine tune your site based on the information that’s contained within the reports. To fine tune your site so you can make the site better and more relevant to your visitors, helping them to convert easier. Then it also tells you which marketing efforts are paying off, which ones are not, so you can spend more money on those marketing efforts that are paying off and less to no money on the ones that are not, and it gets very, very granular.

Not just which marketing campaigns or working but let’s say you’re doing Google Cost-Per-Click advertising or Pay-Per-Click advertising as an example. You’ll not only be able to find out which campaigns are making you money, you will also be able to find out which ads are making you money and which keywords are making you money, so it’s really, really fabulous and it can be very granular and it can also be very big pictured, depending on where you’re looking in the reports.

DB Right okay. Should companies be concerned at all about giving all this information to Google as well as themselves?

TS Sure. Well, it’s astonishing when we run, and we do run into many people who go to conferences and trade shows and run into people who end up doing business with us. They’ll either get on one of our training programmes or they’ll work with us to have us manage their paid search initiatives. We run into an amazing number of them who will say, well we’re not tracking our website visitors at all.

So we sort of know we’re making money but we’re not really sure where and you know, if you’re spending $5, $500 a $1,000 or pounds a month or more on paid advertising, it really, really makes sense to figure out what’s working and what isn’t.

DB Hmm-hmm. You don’t think there’s a valid argument if companies are a little bit concerned about sharing their key visitor tracking information with Google as a company.

TS Well Google already knows quite a bit about what’s happening on the web. Google bought the company for the purpose of helping marketers to learn more. What they found is that website owners who know more will end up spending more and more money with the company and medium that gives them the best results. So by buying this company Urchin Software and making the service completely free through Google Analytics, Google came to the conclusion that website owners can spend their money on actually tracking their ROI instead of paying just to measure their ROI.

So yes, Google does have access to this data but their goal is for folks that own websites to be able to get this data for them and Google already knows quite a bit about what’s working and what isn’t. If you look at the Google toolbar, you know, many, many, millions of people have the Google toolbar and so the data is already out there.

Essentially, basically, Google I think already knows much of this information so again their major goal is just to give people the opportunity to measure for themselves but if someone really super concerned about that. We do work with government agencies, universities, and so forth, who want to track their own data and they do not want to share it at all, then that’s why we still have Urchin Software and it’s quite alive and well and you can purchase enough Urchin Software to be able to measure this independently, it’s just that it’s thousands of dollars in a purchase, as opposed to a service that’s completely free; so there are options for people that are concerned about it.

DB And of course one of the advantages of using Google Analytics is its inbuilt relationships with Google AdWords, the Google Pay-Per-Click programme. Could you possibly explain how that works and the key benefits of it being integrated with the AdWords programme?

TS Sure and that is a big, big selling feature for Google Analytics. The biggest benefit is that by linking your Google AdWords and your Google Analytics accounts together you’ll be able to see in Google Analytics how much you paid for a click and how much revenue you got back from that click, or from a bigger perspective how much you spent on the campaign, one of your major paid search marketing campaigns last month and then how much revenue you got back from it and it’s all lined up within Analytics. So you can look at cost in one column and in the same row look at your revenue; it makes analysis very, very easy.

DB And of course…

TS It also simplifies a lot of the. This can eliminate any need for tagging; there’s a feature called auto tagging. Basically, it puts all of the tracking codes in the referral string automatically, so you don’t have to do it manually.

DB Of course I’ve seen the ability within Google Adwords to test a couple of different Adverts at the same time. I would assume this data can be analysed within Analytics as well?

TS Absolutely, yes. So within analytics you can measure the effectiveness of one ad creative against another. You can assess the effectiveness of the one keyword against another, or multiple keywords against a multiple of others, as well as your ad groups against other ad groups, or campaigns against other campaigns. You can even within Google Analytics compare a Google campaign against a Yahoo campaign, or an MSN campaign.

So it’s really nice to be able to see all of that in one nice neat little place. As a bonus there are also techniques for being able to assess any offline campaigns that may be driving traffic to your website, so there’s a way of using Google Analytics through a little bit of Java Script redirect information that.

Or rather a technique, a Java Script redirect technique that will allow someone to with a unique URL to be able to track a direct mail campaign, billboard, ad, for instance a radio ad. It’s quite amazing what you can do and you can track it all on one console, so you can see what’s making you money for your site and what isn’t.

DB I certainly understand why that’s your core strength and your main core strength as a company as ROI Revolution. I’ll tell you what, now if a business wants to trade online; I’m thinking about an E-Commerce site here, what benefits does Google Analytics offer them?

TS Sure. Google Analytics offers the E-Commerce site some additional benefits that are not found with folks who are running a lead generation site or a brand awareness site, or subscription site. You get an additional number of reports within the E-Commerce section, if E-Commerce tracking is enabled for your E-Commerce website. For instance, you can get product keyword correlation reports, so wouldn’t it be nice to know what keywords drove the $400 dollar purchases on your site instead of the $15 or pound purchases on your site. So that is completely available. Wouldn’t you like to know what cities generated the most revenue within your country, which cities generated the most revenue for you, so you can do that within the E-Commerce reports, you can look at a list of all your orders, you can look at how many you sold of a particular item last month or yesterday. There’s an amazing level of additional reports that are available for folks who have an E-Commerce site and are selling products online.

DB I’d say that the most common reason why businesses I talk to are interested in visitor tracking is that they don’t know how to set lead generation goals. Could you give us some advice about what kind of goals businesses should be setting for their lead generation and how Google Analytics can be used to track conversion rates?

TS Absolutely. With lead generation sites and let me just give you an example of what I mean by a lead generation site. So, let’s say that you sell highly priced industrial machinery and you are not going to sell those machines online. Quite frankly, you could also be getting leads for any number but just so we have a concrete example.

So you sell highly priced industrial machines online and your website gets folks to subscribe to a free white paper that explains a lot of information about your machinery or requests an appointment with a sales representative, so that’s an example of a lead generation site. Another example is, let’s say that you’re selling a line of health supplements and you have a free, seven key reasons or seven key mistakes that people make when choosing health supplements, as an example and you want people to give you their email address and in exchange you’ll send them a nice little booklet explaining this totally for free. So these are all examples of a lead generation website.

A real estate agent may give access to listing information by folks registering through their website and when the registration comes through then the access is given. That’s another example of the lead generation website. David do you have any more examples that are a little more common?

DB Well, I do have a lead generation site myself. I have done a little bit of testing on it, probably not as much as you’d recommend but that site’s called www.Top10SEOMistakes.com and…

TS Oh nice.

DB And what it does is it, it’s a very simple one page site and if people. I’m using the Aweber autoresponder within that and people simply put their name and email address and once they actually click on the double-opt-in that they receive in their inbox, then they’re automatically sent a PDF report.

TS Sure.

DB So that page converts at something like 30% or so of people landing on the page will request information. I’m fairly happy with that but it can perhaps be improved. I’ll tell you what I did test on that page; I had my photograph. I put a photo of me on it and actually improved it slightly, so I think it showed that I was willing to show who I was so people trusted it a little bit more and I also had a little bit of audio on there as well. What I found was interesting is when I set the audio to play automatically, I didn’t get as good a conversion rate but when I gave the option of the audio to play, I got a better conversion rate.

TS Interesting.

DB Yeah, so that’s probably the main experience I’ve had concerning a lead generation site.

TS Well, let me just give you an example, since you asked how can people monetize a lead generation site with Google Analytics. The main concept is, let’s just say that when someone fills out a lead. Let’s say that you get 100 leads last month. One hundred sales leads, 100 folks who requested your white paper, whatever you have on your site that’s important to you; you received 100 of them just to keep the numbers even.

DB Right.

TS And let’s say that your total revenue for your folks who had submitted their information last month, let’s say your total revenue was oh say, £5,000, okay. So we have 5,000 and the pounds in revenue was achieved from 100 leads that came through your website last month.

DB Okay.

TS So what we’re able to do with a little bit of simple maths is £5,000 divided by 100 leads, that’s £50 per lead. So, what Google allows you to do in the analytic settings is set the goal amount as £50 or $50 if you’re in the US as an example.

DB Hmm-hmm.

TS So, what happens is, is that every time a lead comes through on average it’s going to be worth £50 or $50, or whatever?

DB Hmm-hmm.

TS And so what happens is, over time you’ll be able to see a pattern of which marketing campaigns generated the most £50 lead events, or which keywords generated the majority of the £50 or $50 dollar lead events and so over a period of a month, two months, three months, you’re going to get more and more data and the patterns are going to start to emerge.

You’ll start to see that certain keywords drive a lot of these lead generation events at very little cost and you’ll also find many where the leads are very few and far between and you’re spending a lot of money. So I cannot over emphasise the importance of monetizing your goals and getting that simple maths exercise done and then the result of that implemented in the goal amount section of your Analytics settings for your lead generation website. Does that help make it a little more clear?

DB Definitely, I think that’s an excellent specific example that people can go away and use hopefully within their lead generation type website. I’ll tell you what, you also mentioned brand awareness site. Could you possibly give us an overview of what you meant by that and if someone didn’t actually have a lead generation or E-Commerce type website, how they would actually be able to use Google Analytics still to provide them with lots of excellent information?

TS Sure. Let’s just take an example of a chain of shoe stores that would love to promote getting people into the store. They don’t want to sell shoes online. They are not looking for leads because no one’s going to call or follow up, it’s not a lead generation website. They just want to excite interest into getting people into their stores. Can we use that example?

DB Yes that sounds good.

TS Alright, so I have a client that fits that basic case and what they did is they put a little fun multicoloured roulette wheel in website code on their website that people could click a spin button and they could win a variety of dollars off coupons and so they’d hit the wheel and spin to win, so to speak, okay?

DB Okay.

TS So then when it landed upon what they won, the coupon, then they monetized that as a goal within Google Analytics. So every person that spun the wheel, perhaps it was worth a dollar to them or fifty cents or whatever the amount was and so, by doing that, by depositing an amount of money into their Google Analytics account every time someone completed that action, which was very important to them, then it helped them to determine what ads, or keywords or what campaigns were paying off, in the same way that we did it with the lead generation site.

Another example is a brand awareness site that wants to promote folks to subscribe to their newsletter, so their goal is to drive as many people to the website, so that they can keep their constituents up to date with what’s happening in the world of their product. So they want to drive, and every person they drive to subscribe to their newsletter is worth $2 to them.

DB Okay.

TS Still another example. That’s another example of a brand awareness site with a brand awareness goal but monetized so that you can determine what’s working. The problem is, just like with a lead generation site, if you do not monetize your goals you’ll have no idea what’s working. Thirty-eight percent of the reports in a lead generation website Google Analytics have monetary amounts, and so if you don’t have those dollar figures in the goal amount then a good share of the programme is wasted without doing that, so it’s really important.

DB Excellent. I think that’s a really good tip, even though you’re not necessarily selling a product you can still apply a monetary value to a goal and that can help you considerably when you’re looking at your stats there.

TS Yes 100%.

DB You also mention filters on your website. Could you possibly tell us a little bit about filters and how people would use them?

TS Sure. Well, filters are used for a variety of things, some that are sort of on a beginning level, some that can get way advanced and would go past the scope of today’s call. Let me just give you a real simple example, a common example that most people use.

DB Okay.

TS So, if you have a website and you want to look at your website yourself and you’re in an office where you have a static IP address.

DB Hmm-hmm.

TS You can filter out any hits from your own IP address so that your traversal of your own website, your website activity does not get reported into Google Analytics. So when you look at results of what pages people are looking at and so forth, it filters out your own website traffic. Does that make sense?

DB Yes it does.

TS So there’s an easy way to do that in the settings menu of Google Analytics, so you can filter out your own traffic. There’s a variety of other things that you can do with filters but they’re quite a bit more advanced and we have plenty of information on some of the higher end filters that we’ve written about on our blog.

DB I’ll tell you what, going through Google Analytics there’s an awful lot of information. If someone clicks on the panel to the left hand side they can see goals, visitors, content but also within there, things like map overlay and new versus returning. What perhaps are maybe the three or four most essential pieces of data that people need to be tracking?

TS That is a really big question, I’ll qualify that one as well because it really depends on what hat you’re wearing today so to speak so, in one case you may go to Google Analytics and you may be wearing your usability or Webmaster hat and you want to find out how people are accessing the site as far as, are they using a broadband or high speed connection? What percentage of your visitors are still using dialup and that can help answer the question, how much rich media do you place on this site? Like high content videos and other things that might require a faster speed connection.

DB Okay.

TS Another example, if you’re wearing your Webmaster hat today is you want to find out which screen resolutions are most people accessing my site from? How many people are still using an 800 by 600 pixel monitor resolution? Why is that important? Well if you’re redesigning your website as a Webmaster you want to know how wide you can make your website. If you still have a fair number of people who are using an 800 by 600 pixel monitor resolution then you may not want to make that site any wider than about 750-760 pixels to allow room for the vertical scroll bar.

DB Okay.

TS So that’s another example. Let’s say that today or tomorrow rather, you come back to Google Analytics and you’re wearing your marketing hat and you go to Google Analytics with the questions well, how did my Google AdWords advertising, how did that work on my site? So you’ll simply click on the traffic sources section and then click on AdWords and then AdWords campaign, and within that section you will be able to see all of your Google AdWords advertising campaigns, and you’ll be able to see for those campaigns how many clicks were generated? What was the average time on the site? What was my bounce rate, the folks that found on my site irrelevant and what were the percentages of new visits versus returning visits? What were the percentage of clicks that led to revenue and to ROI? What percentage of the clicks led to an E-Commerce conversion where they purchased a product from my website? Which clicks led to the conversion of one of my lead generation goals? All of that is contained, and that’s only one report that we’re talking about.

DB Right.

TS There are other reports from a marketing standpoint that you’ll want to use like, what traffic did you get from search engines as an example? How much traffic did you get from links from other sites that link to your site, as an example? Essentially, if you’re wearing your marketing hat you’ll want to spend a lot of time in the traffic sources section of your website.

DB Right. Google Analytics is great for tracking company data over time and comparing it. How long’s a reasonable length of time to leave the code on your site before you can reasonably compare performance of your website now today, compared with some time in the past?

TS Sure. That’s a great question, I love the way you worded that David because you really want to look at trends over time. Many people are wondering, well what’s a good conversion rate for my site or what’s a good bounce rate to shoot for? Well the true answer is, you want to shoot for a conversion rate that’s 100% and a bounce rate that’s 0% but that probably isn’t very obtainable.

So what you want to find out is what is your conversion rate now. If it’s 2%, what changes can you make to your site to get that conversion rate to 3% or 4%. If your bounce rate is 90% what can you change in the page and test to see if it lowers it to 60% or 50%. So the neat thing about Google Analytics is you’ve got a great platform for testing your ideas and finding out what things that you do improve the site and what things do you do that do not improve the site?

DB I take it you’d certainly advise just changing one thing at a time and then testing it, and then going and testing one other thing, rather than changing too many things?

TS Absolutely, and so the answer to the question about time; it really depends on your traffic, shorter if you’re averaging 1,000 or more visitors per day and certainly, a longer amount of time if say, you’re only averaging 50 or 100 or 200 visitors a day.

DB Okay, so it all depends on the amount of visitors. Google Analytics has changed recently of course to Version 2. What improvements have been made there?

TS Sure, absolutely a great question. Well, there are a number of improvements. First of all what you’ll see right away is the newly redesigned interface that’s really fantastic looking. Many people find it easier to find the information that they’re looking for, so it’s a real. It’s a fun new easier interface, that’s number one.

Number two is, it gives you a much deeper way to drill down into segment information, so that you can find out the view at 30,000 feet as an example and then drill down closer and closer and closer until you can find out some of the most minute details of your traffic. For instance, it’s nice to know that 33% of your traffic was sent from other sites.

It’s even nicer to be able to click on the referring sites at Google Analytics and find out which site sent you that traffic. It’s even better to be able to look at what is the exact URL of the link that got generated for the traffic to my site. So at the 30,000 foott view we saw that 33% of the traffic came from other websites. At the closer view we found out which sites sent us those traffic and at the very microscopic view, we found out which page or pages on a particular site sent the traffic to our site.

That’s just one of the examples that you can do with the hole drill down mode and the ability to segment date; it gets much, much deeper than that. So the next thing I’m really excited to mention is the ability to generate PDF reports, including the colourful graphs, so you can print out your reports and share them with other people within your company or your organisation, and show them where this traffic is coming from.

What marketing campaigns are working; so, it allows you to create colourful PDFs that you can share your data and then beyond that, there’s a really nice additional feature where you can email a report to yourself periodically. Say, once a week you want to see the referring sites report, or once a week you want to see the traffic report from your search engines.

You can email it to yourself; you can email it to other people. It’s really a fantastic way to stay on top of your stats in your website traffic conversion without logging in every time and those are just four of the neat features that are available on the new version of Google Analytics. That’s available to everyone with a Google Analytics account.

DB Superb. You’ve emphasised how incredible Google Analytics is in terms of the vastness of the information that businesses can get. To a certain degree it’s a little bit overbearing for new businesses. Could you perhaps just leave us with three top tips of maybe the most essential ways to get started with analytics, or perhaps the most essential pieces of data that they should be tracking to begin with?

TS The data will depend upon what your goal is. It is very overwhelming at first. There are over 81 reports that are available to folks who have an E-Commerce site and over 68 reports available to folks who have a lead generation or brand awareness site in Google Analytics. These reports are available once you’ve properly configured your account. We find many people that haven’t configured their Google Analytics, right. So to getting it set up properly the first time is really, really important. Do you mind if I mention some… One of our training resources that we have available for people that want to explore this deeper?

DB Not at all that would be good.

TS Okay, terrific. Before I do that, let me tell you about a couple of free resources that we have available on our website. The web address is www.roirevolution.com. And when you’re there you’ll see that on the left side of our home page we’ve got a free 7 day Google Analytics email course that you can sign up for completely free.

DB Okay.

TS We have a live Google Analytics training webinar that we here at ROI Revolution create and we present live about every three weeks. Let’s see what else. We have a free newsletter.

DB Okay.

TS That goes out twice a month and so those are those resources and then in addition to that, if you go to www.roirevolution.com/training you’ll find a full, a training series, a six week course on the first three weeks, helping you to get Google Analytics configured correctly. So you can be assured that the data in your Google Analytics account is correct and it’s accurate and then the last three weeks, the weeks four through to six, give you a complete walkthrough in how to find…

How to get familiar with the reports within Google Analytics. How to navigate new Google Analytics. How to get in depth information on your marketing campaigns and basically, how to pick and choose where to spend your time within Google Analytics. So, it’s a great resource and that’s certainly available and infact we’ve got a new session that starts June 14th. So for more information check that out at www.roirevolution.com/training.

DB Excellent stuff. Well you’ve provided an awful lot of information there and a good lot of additional information where people can go to and research Google Analytics further. I was going to finish by asking you to give some contact information but I would guess that people just visit your website www.roirevolution.com and can contact you directly from there. Would that be right?

TS Yes absolutely, and we also have a contact page at the very, very end if they have any questions but hopefully with all of the free resources that are available on the site, they’ll see that there’s a lot of great information that’s available.

DB Great stuff. Well I appreciate you joining me today. An excellent and informative call. Many thanks again Timothy.

TS Right, thank you David.

An introduction to website analytics, our audio interview with Matt Trimmer is only available to Inner Circle members. If you’re already a member, click here to listen to the interview now.

Matt Trimmer

DB Well, could you perhaps begin by telling me a little bit about your own personal background and indeed, iVantage?

MT Yeah sure. Well, I suppose I got involved with the internet quite early on working for a company called Network Computing Devices and they are widely accredited with really inventing X-Technology, which was really in its time a competitor to Microsoft Windows but on UNIX, so it was really a graphical user interface on UNIX technology. NCD also invented a browser at the time called Mariner, which would pick up hyperlinks from a web page and allow you to navigate a web page through just the hyperlinks alone, so I kind of got aware of the internet then and really then started working for a British company that was marketing worldwide software.

I was responsible for software there and really kind of discovered the internet and how the internet could be used to sell and market things on a global basis, and really, I just. At that company actually we employed a man by the name of Danny Sullivan who many of you might know as being really the world’s leading authority on search engines. Danny came in because he lives in Britiain, came in to consult with us and I got this search engine bug really and just found it very interesting at the time and decided then after a while that I would start my own company iVantage, and iVantage is very much a company that looks after, well it’s focussed on search engine marketing in terms of paid search and organic search.

I think ever since we’ve started really we’ve had a very strong inclination towards measuring what we’re trying to do, so we’ve used Urchin for many years and Urchin as you may or may not know was a company out of Santiago that had a product called Urchin as well. That was the company and product that was acquired by Google and then Google now have Urchin from Google, which is a software product you can buy from people like us the authorised partners and Google Analytics became the free service that you see now. So that’s kind of a brief snapshot of me and I suppose iVantage.

I mean iVantage really focuses on traffic generation, traffic analysis, traffic conversion and traffic protection and that obviously lands us very much in the world of search.

DB Right, okay. Well thanks very much for that overview.

MT Pleasure.

DB Sorry, on your website you talk about the route to online profitability.

MT Yes.

DB And traffic analysis is obviously only a part of that jigsaw.

MT Hmm.

DB Now the first aspects that you talk about to consider are web design and backend design.

MT Yes.

DB Could you possibly start by explaining the importance of these two areas and the differences between them?

MT Yes I think fundamentally there’s still a lot of websites that are built from an aesthetic point of view; most people still think that a website should look pretty. Well of course it should but I think a lot of people forget about what I call the information architecture behind a site and it’s really the functionality of a site and how it should perform from the basis of you know, user’s are coming to the website to perform a task and the task that they should perform should more likely than not match a commercial goal that your website is trying to achieve.

Now a great example of that is an E-Commerce site, where an E-Commerce site is selling something that somebody wants, so a user comes to buy something that’s a task they want to finish and a commercial goal is obviously for you, is winning that sale, getting that sale. So E-Commerce is a nice straightforward model to think of in that regard but I think that where a lot of people get it wrong is B2B websites. So we see a lot of B2B websites that may be, for example, have lots of good information.

They give away all this information maybe for free but what they might have been able to do is possibly for example, put a form on the website that says yes, we’ll give you this brochure in exchange for giving us your name and address and that then, getting a name and address or an email and a telephone number for example, converts to a lead for a B2B company where a sales person can ring up that person and try and qualify and see what’s going on. So, that’s how I see backend design and aesthetic design in that a website should fundamentally be designed from a functional point of view and then later the aesthetics can be really just popped on the top afterwards. So that’s really what I mean by that; really just making sure that your website is about achieving your goals whilst allowing visitors to accomplish tasks that they want to and when those two meet then you have a successful website.

DB Excellent advice there and of course, when you use your website as a lead generation tool, over time you’re not actually giving one hundred percent reliance to search engines to generate your traffic, so you’re becoming a little bit more self reliant as well?

MT Exactly, what through sort of viral marketing and word of mouth marketing, things like that? Absolutely yeah.

DB And in your circle of online profitability there are four key areas in your next layer; traffic generation, traffic conversion, analysis and protection.

MT Hmm-hmm.

DB Now I know it’s a very wide topic but I’d like you, if it’s okay to talk a little bit about traffic generation?

MT Yeah sure.

DB What would you say are the most important initial ways of generating website traffic that a business should be concentrating on?

MT Okay, well I think for any website I suppose there’s lots of options really I think but I think fundamentally, let’s say you’re a new website. If you’re a new website it’s going to be quite hard for you to get organic traffic because the way search engines work is that they follow links from other places and find your website. So, first of all you have your website has to be found, also you need to get good links to your website because search engines work on the principle really of understanding trusted sites. So they know certain sites like Yahoo for example, is a directory, DMOZ is another directory; they know these high quality sites.

So if your site can get links from those it’s a good basis for a search engine to start beginning to understand that your site is trusted, it has been reviewed by humans, so a crawling search engine like Googlebot will be able to trust your site a bit more. So a new site being launched into the world is quite difficult to get really strong organic traffic because what you really need to do is start getting links, and you should get links from directories and maybe other people in your industry and things like that but fundamentally a new site, it’s going to be hard to get organic traffic. You should maybe really look at paid search. I do recommend Google a lot because I think.

Why do I recommend Google? I think the reason being is that Google is quite easy to use, it also dominates the market so if you’ve got a limitless budget, which I’m sure most people have then you can really use Google first and foremost. Google has some very powerful features in that you can do things like, you can have a bank of ten keywords and you could have five adverts that rotate evenly and then you get to know which ad of those five is working best for you.

That sort of testing is really quite powerful because you get to know, well okay, my customers that come to my website seem to like the message that I give out about, for example, free delivery. So then you can make more ads around free delivery. So traffic generation I think, from a very search biased point of view, very much should be about getting ready for organic, if you’re a new site. If you’re an existing site again, link building is important; there’s lots of things you need to do organically to sort your search engine out. We call it, sorry to sort your site out.

We call search engine optimisation really, the ability for a search engine to find, crawl, read, index and rank your site. So there’s lots of things you need to do but paid search is a great way of bypassing a lot of those things. A good thing about paid search is that you pay your money and you get your traffic and you should, with a tool like for example, Google Analytics, you should be able to measure what’s happening in terms of the return you’re getting. So even if you’re a B2B site and you can probably track back the fact that a lead coming into you is let’s say worth, you know £50 based on your conversion rate.

So you can even put that value into Google Analytics and say right, okay, well if a lead is worth £50 to me that’s completed on my website then I can track that back and work out what I should be paying per click for my Google AdWords. So with Google AdWords I’d say that you should spend some time learning how to use it. You should try and do exact matches, which are using square brackets around your keywords, so you’re not wasting money. I’m afraid we do hear a lot of people who come to us and they maybe have tried Google AdWords and they do often think that it’s been a waste of money for them and the truth is that it’s unfortunately probably the way that they’ve tried to use it. They probably use very broad keywords. They’ve not used exact matching. They’ve maybe not had a great landing page and things like that. So page search, organic search clearly are very important things to do. What else could you do to generate traffic well; you could look at affiliate programmes.

I’m personally not a fan of affiliate programmes, I think especially for major brands affiliate programmes tend to often use your brand too much to get traffic but you know, for some people they are the right thing to do if you don’t have the resources and the time. Maybe you are let’s say a retail site, then using an affiliate programme can be quite good but you need to be aware of the pitfalls. The other thing that you can do is obviously banner advertising. You can buy banners on various networks. Even with Google you can use. Why I say Google is because buying banners can actually be quite a difficult thing to do, you need to buy a relationship. You need to buy a tenancy agreement with people but Google again kind of makes it easier where you can go on and choose sites you’d like to maybe show banners on and you pay quite an effective cost per impression, or cost per click; so that’s another good one. I think also email marketing is obviously very, very powerful, although it can be quite hard work because you’ve got to really talk to your customer base about what you’re doing, so it involves building generally some kind of regular email but it is quite powerful. So those I think are a lot of the things that we do in the area of traffic generation and those are certainly the ones that we focus on most of the time. Probably those ones are the ones that can start quite quickly because generally people want traffic now, so those are things that we start doing. Hope that was useful David.

DB Yes it was indeed an excellent overview, thank you. You touched on getting listed in directories?

MT Yes.

DB Would you say it’s of value for any business to pay to get listed and pay $299 or £199 to get listed in the Yahoo directory?

MT Yeah absolutely. As I say if you were building a search engine tomorrow, one of the things that you’d do, you have to say well, how do I know which sites are of a certain authority and of a certain status? And the one place you’d look is you’d look at DMOZ and you’d look at Yahoo. DMOZ is copied by Google as a Google directory so, even a search engine like Google that ultimately is automated still needs a reference point to begin. So you can see that having a link, being in the directory system of Yahoo, the directory system of DMOZ and other directories, they’re just great reference points and it’s almost like a tick in the box that if you’ve got a link in these sites, it’s kind of a mark in favour of you being an established site that somebody knows about. Getting into a Yahoo Directory means generally that a human would have reviewed your site, so your site would probably be of a certain quality and it certainly won’t be spam.

DB Moving onto traffic conversion, now many businesses I’m sure go through the learning curve of not getting many visitors to their website and then getting a reasonable number of visitors but that site traffic not resulting in more business.

MT Yeah.

DB And I would imagine that you would advocate continual testing and amending of web strategy to actually try and improve conversion rates.

MT Well absolutely, I think testing is one of the big pillars of internet marketing I think. It’s, you know I said earlier about Google AdWords for example, where you can have five AdWords for ten Keywords that really is a form of testing, in fact we call it AB testing, you know from the direct marketing world. Conversion is the same, once you start coming into a website you then really need to test for how a visitor, or how the visitors are converting to your goals.

Remember we spoke earlier about goals. So again, that’s why it’s important to have a website that does have very clear goals that you need to accomplish and as I’ve said, the goals should match onto the user task. I’ve only seen very few websites where I could not possibly think of a good commercial goal for them and some of the websites that fall into that category are generally sort of very brand aware in this type of websites where they exist to maybe, not necessarily promote a product but they’re related to a product and they’re trying to talk about an issue like say, a men’s health issue or something and really they’re selling Viagra but they’re selling Viagra on another site. So those sites are very difficult to have as a goal but really, any site for even B2Bs or anything like that, should have very clear goals and if you’ve got clear goals, with something like Google Analytics you can measure the conversion rate.

You can measure what is the rate at which your site converts visitors and then you can make changes to those things. With Google Analytics you can build a great funnel which will record the path that users take to that conversion and obviously, that will allow you to sort of drill down and think, oh hang on a minute, we seem to be losing a lot of people on this page, why are people abandoning at this point. That might allow you to kind of look at that page and look at it and think, well, I see why because maybe the postcode lookup isn’t as easy to use as it could be.

So that’s, yeah, conversion is very much about testing. Also I don’t want to be a salesman for Google but I think Google have some really great ideas and they produce some great technology. One of the thing’s that they’ve recently been ‘betaring’ is a website optimiser tool where what you do with that is you actually build an advert. You obviously have some keywords, you have an advert and then the advert will land on the landing page and with the website optimiser tool you’re actually being able to test combinations of advert and landing page.

So the landing page, you might have various components that you can swop around and what you’re doing is, you’re actually conducting an experiment to see which combinations of page components and advert and landing page work, and that’s a very powerful tool; quite an advanced tool. It’s not an easy thing to do but it’s again, if you’re spending money on AdWords and you’re really seriously thinking about trying to tune your conversion then the website optimiser tool is a very powerful mechanism for doing that.

DB And then you mention Google Analytics there of course, an excellent traffic analysis tool. Why Google Analytics over another tool?

MT Well I think there’s a couple of very important reasons, I mean one it is free, which is obviously a powerful incentive for anyone but what I always say to people when we’re doing training and things like that is, possibly one of the perception problems that Google have with Google Analytics when they gave it away was that free equals rubbish and that really isn’t the case. If you look at Google Analytics it uses very sophisticated visitor tracking. It uses cookies and it uses page tagging, which are really widely recognised as being the two pillars, if you excuse the pun

DB Laughs.

MT Again David, for measuring websites. So you really need to send out cookies to identify visitors properly and to get round the problem of log files and things like that and proxies and caches, you really need the ability to tag your pages. So fundamentally, Google Analytics, yes it’s free, two it’s very good technology, it’s based on, you know, if you went out and bought a top of the range web analytics package it would not differ in the way that the visitor tracking is done really.

The other thing about Google Analytics, it’s a great interface. The interface I think has always been quite good but possibly a little bit clunky to use and recently Google Analytics has had a face lift so the new interface is really quite amazing, it’s improved no end. So you get a great tool that you can use that measures everything; it doesn’t just measure Google stuff. You can measure an email campaign. You can measure Yahoo Search Marketing. You can measure MSN Search Marketing. It obviously measures Google AdWords and you can just do that by literally ticking a box in your Google Adwords set up; you just say enable auto-tagging and then everything that you send to your Google. Everything you send from Google AdWords to your website will be tracked if those two are integrated. If your Google AdWords and Google Analytics are integrated and all the cost data as well. That’s the other benefit, is all the cost data from Google AdWords goes directly into Google Analytics, so you get an immediate ROI of what’s going on. So Google Analytics is a very powerful tool, very sophisticated and it allows you to track so many things that. I mean, I’m probably biased but I think it’s the only thing you ever need. I’ve seen lots of other web analytic systems and I think sometimes they can become very, very, very complicated and very difficult to use and you lose sight of what you’re really trying to measure.

DB Right, I Remember three year’s ago or so, I used to use the service called Statcounter that I found quite good at the time but.

MT Right.

DB Obviously Google Analytics is, I think personally as well, the best tool on the marketplace at the moment, without wanting to be an evangelist for the tool either.

MT Yeah, no. Well, I think that’s true, there’s not much to be gained from not using it really. The only downside is you obviously need to be aware, is that your data is going up to Google. They make great pains to say in their privacy statement that they’re not doing anything with that data but it is an issue for some companies.

That’s why some companies might choose to go for Urchin or something like that, where the data is owned and never goes to a third party but with Google Analytics one of the downsides for some companies is that the data goes up to Google and some companies might feel uncomfortable about that, even though Google aren’t doing anything with that data and it’s not as if anybody can look at it really.

DB Right and obviously there are a lot of businesses out there who at the moment, probably still don’t track their visitor data at all. How would you actually sell the imperative nature, the imperativeness of having to actually keep track of your visitor data and analyse that? How would you sell that to a business that doesn’t do it at the moment?

MT Yeah. Well I suppose if you came across a site of somebody like that, what you might find is their normal marketing activities; maybe they’re sending out direct mail. What you might find is that they might be very unsophisticated in that the way they measure that and I would argue that probably you’re never going to, you know, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

So I think that if you’ve got companies that just don’t measure what they’re doing from a marketing perspective, they’re probably never going to feel the need for web analytics but I would argue again, if you have got a company that’s spending money on any form of marketing they should be measuring it. I think one of my greatest frustrations sometimes is that internet marketing is very good value for money and the thing about it is, is it’s actually very measurable and I don’t think it’s fair sometimes that the same sort of stringent measurements are put in place on other forms of advertising, you know, non internet based.

I can’t remember who said it but somebody famous once said that, I know that fifty percent of my advertising budget is wasted; I just don’t know which half.

DB Hmm.

MT And I think that is a frustration for internet marketing because you can measure it, you know exactly the ROI with the right tools, and if you’re getting an ROI why would you not spend more but it generally is a little bit unfair because you’re not comparing other marketing mediums in the same light, you’re not comparing the ROI so I would say that it’s obviously, it’s critical to measure anything you’re doing in marketing and therefore anything online as well, and they should all be measured on the same basis. I bet you find that most of the time internet marketing would win hands down on a lot of ROI cases.

DB Right. It’s difficult to know, maybe someone using Google Analytics for the first time, which data to look at. So I’d like to try and give people just a little bit of a path into how to use Google Analytics effectively for their business.

MT Hmm-hmm.

DB Perhaps breaking it down into three areas. You might do it differently. I was thinking about direct links from other websites and other referring sources; maybe perhaps email campaigns and obviously search engines as well.

MT Yeah.

DB How would you actually give businesses an overview of the best initial data to analyse using Google Analytics?

MT Okay. Well I think there’s probably three kinds of fundamental things that you need to be aware of with Google Analytics in that, Google Analytics at its heart will measure anything coming in from a website as a referral. So, if you have a link on a website it will be recorded in one of the many reports on a website. I’m just going into Google Analytics now, so I can. Obviously nobody can see this but it will just help me, prompt me into what I’m talking about.

DB Hmm.

MT Say, for example, any website that sends you a visit via a hyperlink will be recorded as a referral, so we call that traffic sources and the traffic resources therefore would be referring sites. Now referring sites can therefore be further broken down into, is the referring site a type of search engine. So Google Analytics identifies the fact that well yes, this is a search engine.

The next thing you really need to do is you need to understand, well if I’m getting traffic from Google is the traffic the paid kind, i.e. from Google AdWords, or is it the organic kind and Google Analytics does a really good job at identifying that. You have to do a little bit of work; with Google you just need to turn on auto-tagging and then it will fundamentally tell you what’s coming in from Google from an organic perspective and what’s coming in from Google from a paid perspective. That’s really powerful.

DB Okay.

MT And with a little bit more work, you can do that on say Yahoo and on MSN as well. So fundamentally knowing what’s coming in from a referring site and the referring site could be any partner that you’ve chosen, it could maybe even be your web design partner who may have put you up as a client of theirs on their site, so that might be referring traffic. Then splitting it down into search engine, and then splitting it down into whether that’s organic or whether that’s paid. Direct traffic is important; I mean direct traffic is obviously what we consider as traffic coming in to you that has no referrer.

Now what that means is if you like, what I like to call that sometimes is a measure of your offline marketing because it’s people who are putting in your website directly into their browser, so they’re remembering your URL. Now they might be remembering your URL on the basis of an advert they’ve seen on the tube or an advert in a magazine but the other thing that’s important to remember is that would include people who have bookmarked you in their browser as well.

DB Hmm-hmm.

MT So that’s slightly unfair. The other thing to bear in mind as well is if you were sending emails, then it would include if you haven’t tagged your email campaigns, it would also include people coming in from an email because it’s landed in their Outlook Inbox, for example, they followed the link and you’re not coming in as a referrer, your coming in from Google unless it’s perspective as direct.

Again, you can fix all that; you can tag all your email campaigns, so you can tag them as email. In fact, Google unless it has three areas that you can tag on your own accord and that’s campaign, source and medium. So medium, for example CPC is what Google calls itself on the paid side, it calls itself CPC. So if you were to tag Yahoo as CPC as well then you could just make a comparison between what your whole CPC channel is doing. So, I think those are the most important areas that you would generally look at from a traffic perspective; direct traffic, referring sites, drilling down into referring sites you’re really looking at search engines, and then you’re really wanting to know what’s paid and what’s organic. Then the great thing about Google is you can tag anything and to do that you have three things to use, you have campaign, medium and source.

DB And as well as analysis where your traffic’s coming from you can also now analyse what your visitors do when they come to your site of course. How do you summarise the key benefits of doing that?

MT Well again going back to the point that the main reason that you want to do that is, okay you can look and you can see how many visitors are coming into a certain piece of content. You can look at common paths through your site you know, where people are going but again, that’s not terribly interesting. What you really want to know is, you really want to know how people are converting to this magic word again, how people are converting to the goal.

Remember as I said earlier, the goal is a desirable outcome for you and it’s a task that a user wants to accomplish, so when those two match you have a successful website. So what we really want to do is measure okay, I mean, for example, I’m looking on a site here where I’m looking at goal conversion and my goal conversion on this site, it happens to be an E-Commerce site, but it has three goals, no two goals, beg your pardon, it has goal one is a sale and goal two is a contact us.

I can see here that goal one resulted in a conversion rate of 1.57, so this period I’m looking at which is the whole of May, there were a number of visitors to this site and those visitors converted to a sale at the rate of 1.57%. So that to me means that the site is converting 1.6 of its visitors let’s say and any improvement I can make in that conversion rate would increase profit. Basically increase sales and ultimately profit. So that’s I think one of the most important things that you can look at. Lots of things to look at. Lots of things to look at like content.

How you think people are behaving but fundamentally, you really want to know, you know, what is the conversion rate to goal one. Incidentally, on this site 0.68% of people are using the contact us button. That in itself is actually probably quite high so it leads me to think, well what are they trying to contact us about, are they trying to tell us that there’s a problem with the site or something like that, or why is it that 0.68 of those people are trying to get in touch with us, what are they talking about and I’ve made a note for myself to go and do that. (Laughter)

DB (Laughter). Okay and you mentioned goals there. How should people go about setting their goals as soon as their campaign gets underway? They don’t have any data to begin with.

MT Yeah.

DB So how should these goals be set up initially?

MT Well the goals really are just about the website so again, let’s say on a B2B site you might have a form ultimately that possibly is a contact us, so that to me is a goal. So if somebody types something in, presses the you know, fills in a form, let’s say, I’m Matt Trimmer, I’m from iVantage, my telephone number is, my email is blah blah blah.

You might ask me some qualification questions like, what are you interested in and I might say, I’m interested in the X941 welding machine, and it might even ask me what’s your budget, well my budget is, I don’t know, £10,000. So there’s an element of qualification in that form, I press the button and a little form comes back and it says, thank you, your request has been received and the fact that that just happens.

The fact that I got the thank you page means that I effectively have successfully completed a goal and that goal was a contact us. So you just would tell Google Analytics to say, look this is the goal, when somebody hits this page this is a completed goal. Then what you can also do with Google Analytics is build various pages into what formed the path to that goal, so you could, for example, start at the home page. You could then say, oh well did that person look at our solutions pages.

Did that person look at our product pages and then did that person look at the about us page, and then did that person go to the form, well he must have done and then he finally pressed the button and the form was submitted and therefore we got our goal. This is difficult to describe without pictures but what we’ve built there is a kind of funnel where right at the top is the home page; you’ve got lots of people maybe hitting the home page. Some people coming into the solutions page, some people coming into the product page, some people going into the about us page and that if you like, would form a kind of funnel picture that you’d see. You shouldn’t wait to set up your goals before a campaign starts, as soon as you get Google Analytics going the fundamental thing to do is to set up what you consider to be your goals.

DB Right, okay. One thing that Google Analytics also lets you do is really rethink your business strategy because if you’re discovering that you’re getting lots of visitors querying some particular service that you may not be providing, or perhaps lots of visitors from another country in the world for some reason, then you could potentially offer another service tailored specifically for the data that you actually find through Google Analytics.

MT Yeah I think that’s the thing, I think whenever we really do a sort of Google Analytics course or something like that, I’m afraid a lot of the people in the room suddenly realised how maybe inadequate their websites are for doing what they’re trying to achieve. So it does make you rethink your business strategy; it might make you think about, well how should I integrate a better lead generation into my site. Yes and as you say, you might find that you’re getting a lot of I don’t know, US visitors but you can’t deliver to the US, so it might make you think, well hang on a minute should I be able to offer delivery to the US or should I build another site that caters for the US market.

So yeah absolutely I think, I mean that probably goes back to your original question David, as how important is web analytics? I think it’s critical because it gives you the intelligence to go back and change your business really.

DB And that really leads us onto the final spoke in your online profitability jigsaw and that’s traffic protection.

MT Yeah

DB How would you summarise that?

MT Well I think that there’s, as I say, I’m not a fan of affiliate programmes and I don’t think it happens to everybody but we see this a lot with quite well know brands but you’d be surprised at how quickly a brand can become well known on line. One of the things that you can do, is you can go onto Google.co.uk for example, and search for your brand and what you’ll get more often than not are people using your brand as a keyword to bid on in paid search.

DB Hmm.

MT And the reason they’re doing that is because one, there’s a level of demand there that there’s some traffic there and generally you’ll find that a brand keyword because it doesn’t often have a generic meaning is very cheap to buy from a paid search point of view and they will buy that. One of the worst offenders if you like is generally anything you can type in, I’m just trying now. I’m just typing in rubbish on Google and what have we got. Well, we’ve got some, as you would expect, we’ve actually got some generally relevant people; we’ve got people who are looking to get rid of rubbish for you but often when I do that sometimes is it often will come up with something like buy rubbish from Ebay.

DB Hmm.

MT What that’s saying is some sites just target virtually every keyword.

DB Hmm.

MT But my point is, is that if you type in a brand like, I don’t know, Hilton for example, let’s see haven’t done this. Well, Hilton, if you type in Hilton you’ve got two links there, two paid links. Now I suspect that neither of those are probably the real Hilton Group, they are probably affiliates and the point is, it’s a conscious decision, you either allow that sort of thing to happen, where you don’t mind your brand being used to bid on, or you do. If you do allow it then what you may find is the affiliates that are using your brand, you know, if you click through and land on that page your competitors might be listed there too and they might be, you know, bidding their competitors on that too.

So really traffic protection is about. A lot of the time it’s kind of two areas. It’s one, just basic allowing people to bid on your brand or not, and just realising that that can cause you two issues. It can cost you money because you might want to bid on your brand too and you’re having to compete against your own affiliates or other affiliates.

The other thing, it can also cause reputation issues because if an affiliate bids on your brand and the consumer thinks ah, this must be the real, let’s say, Hilton; I’ll click on it and then I’ll land on an affiliate page and that affiliate page is not the brand experience the user was expecting, so that can be quite damaging but difficult to measure.

I think those are the two areas you need to be careful of and then I suppose the other part of brand protection is the more sophisticated kind where we can monitor what people are saying about you online. Maybe if you’ve got negatives sites that are talking about you, you know, a famous one is Starbuck Sucks, that sort of thing.

DB (Laughter).

MT And that can be very sophisticated where you’re truly trying to understand what people are saying about you, if there’s things negative about you, online searching; it’s really an extension of a search engine that just looks for your brand mentioned in combination with maybe pornography or rude words, or negative language.

DB Right.

MT So that’s the final piece of that jigsaw really.

DB Of course one of the benefits of Google Analytics as well is the fact that it’s integrated with AdWords.

MT Yes.

DB There are many benefits to that but you’re talking there about brands and a lot of businesses maybe initially put up Google AdWords campaigns that perhaps have just one advert. Could you perhaps just touch on slightly the importance of long tail keywords and perhaps having multiple adverts if they’re going to be using Google AdWords?

MT Yeah sure. So I mean, it’s very critical to have a well structured AdWords campaign and a well structured Adwords campaign to us means you’re using multiple ad groups, and an ad group is really a collection. Generally it’s a unit and the unit would contain a number of keywords and the ad group would also have a related advert. The idea is that the ad group should be topical in nature, so the keywords you have within an ad group should be all around the same topic and that gives you the ability to have adverts that talk about that topic.

In fact the ultimate is to have probably what’s called dynamic keyword insertion where the keyword that you’re targeting is inserted dynamically into the ads. So when the user types in, I don’t know, big bananas as a keyword, the ad would display big bananas in the headline and then the ultimate therefore then is to also when they click on that they land on your page that actually talks about big bananas. So a well structured AdWords campaign is about splitting your keywords up into related ad groups, having an advert and then having multiple adverts.

So going back to my big bananas scenario, you might have one advert that talks about big bananas and the fact that they’re free delivery and the other one might be talking about how big and ripe the bananas are; this is a ridiculous example I’m afraid but it serves a purpose. The idea is you’re really measuring what people are converting on, or are they, well not converting but what are they clicking through or are they clicking through on the fact that it’s free delivery, or are they clicking through on the fact that they’re big and they’re ripe.

So you can see that one of those adverts will win through and you’ll be able to say well actually, you know, it was the big and ripe argument that seemed to get people, so I need to build more ads that talk about the ripeness of the fruit. So, critical, absolutely critical that you have lots of ad groups, lots of keywords; well not lots of keywords, a number of keywords within an ad group. The ad groups are topical, they land on an advert, the adverts rotate and even Google itself, ranks your ad on a quality score; the quality score is a function of the price, the function of the click through rate and the function of the landing page.

It’s even measuring your landing page, so if you land, using my ridiculous example of big bananas, if you were landing your big bananas page onto your home page it would not get a high quality score than if you were landing your big bananas advert onto your section of the site that actually talked about big bananas. So very relevant landing page, probably deeper into the site most of the time is the key way to go.

DB Well we’ve covered a lot of areas there, you’ve offered a lot of great advice, are there any final areas pertaining to effective traffic analysis though that you feel we haven’t covered that we need to just perhaps give a brief overview to?

MT I think it’s just a case of measuring. Another thing that Google does is it allows you to compare dates so I think it’s important to compare. Unfortunately, it will take you some time but generally we find in search, search is very seasonal, it’s subject to trends and things like that, so measuring January’s traffic to February’s traffic is not always a useful example but measuring January 2007 with January 2006 I think is very useful. This might be an obvious point but I think that that’s a nice thing.

So you can see if you’ve grown year on year, or if you’ve decreased and why that might be. I think the key to traffic analysis is yes, it’s looking at the types of traffic you’re getting but it’s more important to kind of think about ultimately the conversion rate and then seeing if the conversion rate is supporting where the traffic is coming from. So if you’re getting a large number of visitors for a certain source you might want to find out and dig down and see why you’re getting traffic from that, what the links are saying about you. So, yeah, I think the key thing to traffic analysis ultimately is actually the goal, is building a goal on your website so that you’re getting traffic for a specific reason.

DB Well, thank you very much indeed for joining me today Matt, it’s been very informative but would you like to finish off by providing any contact details for anyone who would like to discuss things more?

MT Yeah sure I will be happy to do that, so our website is www.ivantage.co.uk and our telephone number is 0870 7521066. You can also email us at info@ivantage.co.uk. My email address for anybody who needs it is matt.trimmer@ivantage.co.uk. We’re available online obviously and you can fill in forms if you’d like to contact us as well on the website or just send me an email and happy internet marketing I think is the message I’d like to say.

DB Excellent. Well thanks again.

MT Brilliant, thanks David.

View the entire presentation on website visitor analysis below via the Slideshare website. This is an audio recording of the original 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing seminar added to the original slides.

This video on visitor analysis is the eleventh pillar in our series of internet marketing videos which were recorded at an early version of the 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing seminar. Enjoy!

Visitor analysis is absolutely essential if you want to discover which of your internet marketing activities is proving to be the most valuable for your business. By analysing your website traffic statistics you discover which websites are providing you with most traffic, knowing which websites your users are visiting prior to your site, which websites they are leaving your site for, and which inbound links are providing the most valuable visitors, you can target specific areas and focus future marketing campaigns.

Here are just a few of the things that you should be finding out about your website visitors:

- Where did a visitor come from?
- How long did they stay when they visited your site?
- Which page(s) did they visit on your website?
- Have they visited your site before?
- Can you improve your conversion rate?
- Did they complete a specific action on your website? (i.e. buy a product, complete a service enquiry form, download a free report) Perhaps some of your visitors opted-out half-way through an order process? Is so, that’s essential information.

Hopefully you will understand the valuable nature of this information. If you’re looking at it from a business efficiency perspective then by paying attention to which of your marketing activities is providing the most high-quality visitors, then you will know where to concentrate a lot more of your energy in the future. If you’re thinking about this from a marketing managers’ perspective, then by being aware of where your website visitors are coming from and what they do will be able to justify a greater investment in certain areas in the future.

Google Analytics

The most popular method of collecting website traffic statistics is to use the free analysis software from Google called Google Analytics (Figure 11.1). All you need to access the Google Analytics service is to have your own free Google Account – you will already have one if you’re started a Google Adwords pay-per-click campaign.

A small number of businesses or other organization aren’t comfortable with letting Google have access to their website’s and their visitor’s data. Unless this is the case for you, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t install the Google Analytics code on your website. At least then – even if you decide to go for a paid alternative – you’ll have some alternative data to be able to compare against your preferred visitor tracking software.

Figure 11.1 – Google Analytics

Setting up your Google Analytics service

Having registered your website with Google Analytics, the first things to do is to insert some tracking code on the footer of each page on your site. It’s fairly easy to do – Google provides you with a step-by-step guide of how to get things going. They also provide an excellent help section should you get stuck.

The importance of setting goals with Google Analytics

With regards to Google Analytics, a goal is a page on your website that follows a specific action that you want your visitors to take. An example of a goal might be something like your ‘thank you page’ that people see they once they complete an enquiry form on your website.

Figure 11.2 – Google Analytics

E.g. the path of URLs that your visitors take to reach your goal URL might look something like this:
1) http://www.yourdomain.com
2) http://www.yourdomain.com/enquiry_form.htm
3) http://www.yourdomain.com/thanks_for_completing_enquiry_form.htm

In the above example the page http://www.yourdomain.com/thanks_for_completing_enquiry_form.htm might include the following text:
‘Thanks for filling out your information. We’ll respond to your enquiry as quickly as possible. In the meantime, have you downloaded our free report?

That is your goal page. You enter the URL of this page into your Google Analytics control panel, in your goal settings. You then give your goal a name so you can differentiate it if / when you set up additional goals.

Define your goal funnel

Once you’ve decided on your goal page, and taken a note of your goal URL you’ll need to do something called ‘defining your goal funnel’ (figure 11.3).

Defining your goal funnel tells Google Analytics the path from your visitor entrance page to your goal page. Defining your funnel will help you determine if there is any specific part of the path towards your goal page at which your visitors tend to drop off.

An example of a simple goal funnel is the above URL path which looks at someone when they enter your site on your home page, then visiting an enquiry form page, through to completing the enquiry form and therefore visiting the ‘thank you for completing your details’ page.

A slightly more complicated goal funnel path might be as follows:
- Your website home page
- Category page
- Product page
- Upselling page
- Purchase confirmation page
- Credit card details page
- Thank you for purchasing page

Figure 11.3 – Google Analytics

Analyzing your funnel blockages

Once you have defined your funnel you can analyze which steps of your funnel are blockages – in other words which steps of your funnel people stop at and for whatever reason do not proceed any further.

Figure 11.4 – Google Website Optimizer

Perhaps it’s not obvious what your shipping charges are? Maybe people would like to see a better picture of your product before they make a decision to purchase? Perhaps you’re requesting too much information when you’re asking people to complete an enquiry form? Whatever it is it’s your job to try and find out what the main problem areas are on your website and defining accurate funnels of Google Analytics can help you do this.

Plugging your funnel leaks

But remember, determining the problem is only half the job. There’s no point in working out where people are leaving your goal funnel unless you do something to try to plug the leaks.

Probably the best way to try to improve the situation is to split-test the aspect that isn’t performing too well against an alternative option. Google’s recently introduced some software called Google Website Optimizer (figure 11.4) which will allow you to split-test different aspects within the same page at the same time.

Set a monetary value for each of your goals

One other essential aspect of setting a goal is setting a monetary value for the goal. You can enter a monetary value at the bottom of your goal settings (see bottom of figure 11.2). This value is how much it’s worth to your business if a website visitor completes the Google Analytics goal in question.

What do you mean you don’t how much the people who complete your Google Analytics goals are worth to your business financially!?

If you don’ know exactly how much the people who complete your Google Analytics goals are worth you your business financially then you need to take an educated guess. Because if you don’t include a monetary value then a lot of the reports that Google Analytics can produce for you won’t be available.

Taking an educated guess on how much completed goals are worth to you

If you don’t know exactly, it’s important to take an educated guess as to how much people who complete your Google Analytics goals are worth to you financially. So how do you guesstimate this value? If we assume that we’re talking about a completed enquiry form as a goal, then you should already know how many people who complete your enquiry form go on to make a purchase. And you should also know the average order value for your business.

Therefore, for example, if for every 20 people that enquire about your service one person buys, and that your average transaction value represents £1,000 profit then you know that each person who enquires about your product or service is worth £50 to you, so your goal value will be £50.

Next – work out your conversion rates to determine your advertising budget

The next thing to work out is your conversion rates from someone visiting your home page to completing your enquiry form. You should be able to easily get this figure from your Google Analytics stats – assuming that you’ve set up your goal correctly.

Say you see that 2% of your website visitors go on to complete your enquiry form. Because you’ve already determined that each of your completed goals is worth £50 to you, that means that you know that, on average, each new website visitor is worth £1 to your business.

Therefore if you decide to pay for some website traffic in the future, you have a good idea of how much you can afford to pay for the advertising.

Knowing where you are now gives you something to aim for in the future

The great thing about knowing that a completed goal is worth an average of £50 profit to your business and that 2% of your website visitors go on to reach this goal is that it gives you something to aim for – it means that you can turn your focus towards improving your average transaction profit value and increasing your visitor to goal conversion rates.

Increasing your goal conversion rates could be incredibly important for your business. For example, if you can increase your average goal conversion rates from 2% to 4%, then this in turn increases your average visitor value from £1 to £2.

This increase in average visitor value may well open up your access to thousands of more visitors. If your average visitor value increases, so does your ability to pay more for traffic, meaning that you will have access to bigger networks of paid traffic sources.

Have you inserted your Google Analytics tracking code on your website yet?

Of course all this talk about improving your goal conversion rates is pointless unless you’ve inserted your Google Analytics tracking code on your website and set up your goals – so if you haven’t done this already, do it now!

Figure 11.5 – Google Analytics

Insert the Google Analytics tracking at the bottom of each page on your site (if you can’t figure out how to do this yourself any website coder will find it fairly simple to do). This isn’t as time consuming as you would think – most pages on your website will have what is called a common footer which is replicated on all the pages. This common footer means the code only has to be pasted in one place for it to be automatically included on every page on your site – allowing you to track visits to individual pages.

By setting goals and tracking your visitors you can determine which aspects of your internet marketing campaign are most successful, and which aspects aren’t working so well. It’s extremely important to undertake this analysis to optimize the success of your internet marketing campaign.

Looking at an example of stats on Google Analytics

Using the website www.BuildYourOwnBusiness.biz as an example (figure 11.5) you can see that over a set period of time, 122,194 website visits have been referred from 1,584 traffic sources.

The same screenshot shows that the average visitor viewed 2.21 pages and spent 2 minutes and 11 seconds on the site. You can get a lot more information about your visitors from Google Analytics including which country they’re from and what browser they’re using to view your web pages.

You can also see in figure 11.4 that 86.54% of the website visits were from people who hadn’t been to the website before – and that 68.85% of visitors left the website before choosing to view another page (that’s called the bounce rate).

Although these stats are encouraging in terms of the quantity of visitors, it’s a bit concerning that so many people are choosing to leave the website after viewing just the one page. It’s even more concerning that only 13.46% of visitors choose to come back and visit the website again.

Here you see the advantage of using a good visitor tracking system like Google Analytics. Unless you’re aware of the statistics that you could improve on, there’s very little chance that you’ll know which changes to implement on your website to try to change things for the better.

Keyword Phrases

Something else that Google Analytics allows you to do is to analyze the keyword phrases that people are using to find your website in search engines.

By reviewing which keyword phrases have been driving the most traffic to your website through search engines (Figure 11.6), you’ll be able to see how successful your search engine optimization strategy has been so far.

As you can see in figure 11.6, the most successful keyword phrase by far is ‘business articles’, the phrase that has driven over 10,000 visits from search engines. The next best keyword phrase has driven just 666 visits.

On the face of it, this isn’t good. If you rely too heavily on traffic from just the one keyword phrase, then if search engines – for whatever reason – decide to rank your website in a lower position for that keyword phrase then you may take a big hit on the overall amount of visitors to your website.

Figure 11.6 – Looking at keyword phrases on Google Analytics

Fortunately though, this isn’t the case for the www.BuildYourOwnBusiness.biz website. If you look more closely at figure 11.5 you can see that although 10,319 visits have been generated via the keyword phrase ‘business articles’, this is from a total of 94,285 visits. The ‘business articles’ keyword phrase therefore represents just under 11% of all the organic (free traffic as apposed to pay per click) visits from search engines.

The extremely positive thing from an organic SEO perspective for this website is the quantity of different keyword phrases which are driving traffic. 52,015 different keyword phrases have referred website visits.

You can also see that the category pages are well optimized. For instance, the keyword phrase ‘business law articles’ referred 592 visits, ‘free business articles’ referred 506 visits and ‘operations management articles’ referred 497 visits.

This provides a very important lesson – if you just focus on optimizing for just the one keyword phrase, and just the one page (i.e. your home page) then even if you manage to hit the top of Google for your chosen keyword phrase, the chances are that you’ll still be missing out on 90% of your potential search engine traffic because you haven’t considered longer-tail keyword phrases.

Broadening the quantity of keyword phrases that people use to find your website in search engines has an additional benefit. Not only will you be driving more visitors to your site, you’ll also be safeguarding your traffic from search engines. In short, the more routes into your website, the less you risk having your business seriously affected if you lose the high search engine ranking of ne keyword phrase.

Analyzing traffic from links to your site

Yet another important use of visitor analysis software like Google Analytics is to analyze the quantity and quality of traffic driven to your site directly from links as opposed to search engines.

By selecting ‘traffic sources’ and then ‘referring sites’ in Google Analytics you can view all the different websites that are driving traffic to your site.

From there you can click on one of the listed links and drill down further. If the website that you’re analyzing sent traffic from multiple pages, you’ll be able to see which pages sent the most traffic. You’ll also be able to analyze the quality of traffic from each individual page that sends you traffic. For instance, some websites may send you traffic which on average views many more pages. Other website many send you visitors that are much more likely to convert to your Google Analytics goal target.

Reviewing the quality of traffic from Top10SalesArticles.com

By reviewing the quality of traffic delivered from the website Top10SalesArticles in Google Analytics (Figure 11.7) we can see how much better (or worse) traffic from an individual link is compared with other sources.

For instance, we can se that the average amount of time that a visitor from this site spends on the BuildYourOwnBusiness website is 2 minutes and 9 seconds. This compares with an average of 1 minute and 50 seconds from traffic from search engines.

Figure 11.7 – Google Analytics

You can also see that the bounce rate of traffic from this site is slightly higher – 74.20% compared with a bounce rate of 68.85% from all traffic.

These statistics are interesting, and information about the quality of the landing page can be inferred from the data. For instance, it could be argued that the quality of the home page on the BuildYourOwnBusiness website isn’t encouraging enough visitors to click through and view other pages – it therefore needs to be improved.

Not all traffic to your website is equal

This little exercise of reviewing the differences in website traffic to BuildYourOwnBusiness from varying sources shows that it’s important for you to be aware that not all traffic to your website is equal.

If you are fully aware of the quality of traffic delivered from a certain website – including how much on average each visitor is worth to you, you may be able to justify an increased affiliate referral fee for that website. Visitor value knowledge is power.

This again emphasizes how important it is to set up a monetary value with your Google Analytics goals. Unless you include this, you’ll find it a lot harder to differentiate between the value of traffic from different sources – and therefore much harder to make highly informed future marketing spend decisions.

Can you list the top 10 websites that refer traffic to your website? If so, what have you done to try to increase the volume of traffic from these sources?

Is your website as clearly laid out as it should be?

Something else that’s really important to consider is the pages that your visitors tend to view on your website – for instance, is there a link from your home page which tends to be visited more than any other? If so, you need to know why.

Perhaps you’re website’s as not as clearly laid out as it needs to be. Check how long people stay on their second page for. If’ it’s only a manner of seconds then you should question the value and relevance of the information on that page.

Have you tested your website in different browsers?

Check if there’s any significant difference between people who view your web pages in less common web browsers. If you notice any major difference then you should do some usability testing – test that your site performs and looks just as good in different scenarios.

That’s why testing your site before you start marketing it to the general public is so very important. You can put off quite a few visitors if your website doesn’t display properly in Firefox or Safari. It’s easy to forget that just because you might be using Windows and Internet Explorer to view your web pages, many of your visitors might not be.

Website coding is an art as well as a science. In other words, there’s not necessarily a logical reason why certain parts of your web page might look significantly different, or act in a significantly different manner when viewed through different devices. I recall that for several months a major UK supermarket’s website just didn’t work properly at all when viewed through the FireFox browser. That meant that they may have alienated 30% of their website visitors simply because their website wasn’t thoroughly tested!
Mobile browsing devices

Depending on the technical profile of your audience, you may find that a significant percentage of your website visits come through mobile internet devices. Do you know what your website looks like in a mobile phone? How quickly does it load? Do people viewing your web pages on mobile phones have to scroll before being able to read anything worthwhile?

If being able to view and operate your website from a mobile phone is important for your business (or likely to become important for your business in the future) then you should consider having a special version of your site designed for these devices with less images and straight-to-the-point text.

Don’t guess – make an informed decision

There really isn’t any excuse for guessing when it comes to improving your website for your visitors. Analyzing the statistics from your current visitors should provide you with all the information that you require to make an informed decision to improve things.

And even if you’re not entirely sure, you should use that split-test software which I mentioned earlier (Google Website Optimizer) to test different improvement options. Thorough website visitor analysis is a must if you want your website to reach anywhere near its full potential.

Pillar #11 – Visitor Analysis Summary

• Using Google Analytics you can track many vital visitor statistics like where your visitors come from and how long they stay. You can then use this valuable information to find weak spots in your website like improving important conversion rates.
• Once you have identified your weak spots or discovered a blockage on the site you can amend your website to improve your conversion rates. This is probably something that your competitors aren’t doing.
• You can track the sources of traffic to your site, and more specifically which websites your visitors are coming from, as well as keyword phrases used in search engines to find your site. You can use this to help you determine which keyword phrases to focus on in the future for your SEO.
• Remember that it’s imperative to set goals for your site – and give them a monetary value.
• Make sure you test what your website looks like and performs like on different browsers – this includes mobile phone browsers.
• Don’t delay on getting your visitor tracking set up – unless you set it up now, you won’t have any comparable historical data to analyze in the future.
• Use Google Analytics to help you pinpoint the most valuable sources of traffic to your site – you might be able to make a decision that you can afford to pay more for traffic from certain sources if you can justify it.
• How can you justify any future marketing spend unless you track its performance. Online marketing is unique – the majority of it is entirely trackable and therefore justifiable.

This twelfth episode of our internet marketing podcast looks at Internet Marketing Pillar #11 – Visitor Analysis.

Remember, if you haven’t done so already, before going any further make sure you download the free 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing eBook which accompanies this web visitor analytics podcast.

Click here to listen or subscribe for free using iTunes

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Visitor analysis is absolutely essential if you want to discover which of your internet marketing activities is proving to be the most valuable for your business. By tracking which websites are providing you with most traffic, knowing which websites your users are visiting prior to your site, which websites they are leaving your site for, and which inbound links are providing the most valuable visitors, you can target specific areas and focus future marketing campaigns.

Here are just a few of the things that you should be finding out about your website visitors:

- Where did a visitor come from?
- How long did they stay when they visited your site?
- Which page(s) did they visit on your website?
- Have they visited your site before?
- Can you improve your conversion rate?
- Did they complete a specific action on your website? (i.e. buy a product, complete a service enquiry form, download a free report) Perhaps some of your visitors opted-out half-way through an order process? Is so, that’s essential information.