Google Analytics - Laser focus

Introduction:

This post will take an in-depth look at key reports and measurement tools found in Google Analytics and how they can help the following users:

·      The non-profit organization Children’s Relief International.

·      The small, but growing, e-book publisher Wynn Press.

I will end the post with a few comments on how I plan to use key reports to help me measure social media engagement for a resource I am developing. I decided to take this approach because I have a direct connection to both organizations and I plan to provide advice to each based on the content covered below. The challenge to provide real value to existing organizations felt more appropriate than focusing on my current IMC blog, since its purpose is limited and muted by comparison.  It is exciting to be able to offer this kind of council after just a few weeks of engaging with the content. My hope is that by the end of the term they will be using some of these tools and I will be able to share real results.

Google Analytics and Children’s Relief International.

Children’s Relief International is a small non-profit that helps the world’s poorest children in places like India, Africa, Pakistan, and Burma. They support native leaders in supplying food, medical care and education through a team of dedicated missionaries and volunteers. (Full disclosure, I wrote about CRI in the week 4 discussion post.  I use some of that content in here, but only for set up. The rest is original.) To promote their work they have a decent web site, a half a dozen project blogs, a monthly email newsletter that goes to donors and partners, and an online donate option.

CRI’s main KPI is donor engagement which makes the donate option on their web site crucial to their long-term success. The donate button sits at the top right of the site design. This button stays in the top right no matter what page the user is on. It is always visible. Currently CRI believes the placement of the button is working and easy to engage with.  What they do not know is how long it takes a user to click on donate button and if they actually complete a transition when they are on the donate page.

http://www.childrensrelief.org/

This is where Google Analytics can help. They offer a set of tools that provide a range of reviews options around user flow through the site. Blogger and analytics expert Jim Gianoglio puts provides a more articulate definition, “Flow visualization is a way to understand how visitors flow through your website. It uses intuitive imagery, along with the ability to segment your visitors, to make insightful analysis easier. These reports better help you understand how to optimize your landing pages, navigation, conversion funnels and more. They can help explain the behavior of segments of visitors after they land on a page, and see where there might be commonalities and differences between key segments.” (Gianogilo, 2011)

At first glace these visualization tools feel complicated but they have been put in place to help make the click path analysis process more valuable and user friendly. (Cutroni, 2011)

To begin using these tools CRI will need to identify the pages they want to track. Google Analytics calls these groups of pages nodes. (Cutroni, 2011) It is recommended that CRI group the key pages seen below into a node. As they become familiar with the process they can group pages in more strategic nodes based on key data, which should provide a solid baseline for future measurement and analysis.

Google Analytics offers a wide range of flow visualization tools that could be useful. Two of the more useful reports for an organization like CRI would be the Visit Flow Report and the Navigation Flow Report.

Visit Flow Report.

This will allow CRI to track the navigation flow of a specific segment, which can be traffic source, browser, country, keywords, direct traffic, and a range of other options as visitors move between nodes.  (Waisberg, 2011) This data is useful when trying to analyze the success of a campaign, like CRI’s monthly email campaigns. The report, which is a well designed, easy to navigate flow chart, will show CRI where people came from, what they engage with after arriving on the landing page, and other important details like bounce rate. (Cutroni, 2011)

Navigation Flow Report. 
As CRI establishes their nodes they will need to see how traffic is flowing to and from that node. The Navigational Flow Report will provide that data. (Joe, 2011) This could be used to see trends in visitor behavior and help identify the pages that are better are driving users to the donate page and the pages that have high bounce rates.

If used correctly these visualization tools will help CRI get a better understanding of how their users are navigating their website and how they engage with the donate page. By digging into that data, segmenting it and then identifying key behaviors (are people clicking on the donate button and making a donation) they will be able to manage their content and site design with more precision and efficiency, which may result in strong conversion rates (more donations).

Google Analytics and Wynn Press (www.wynnpress.com)

These tools could be helpful for our next subject too, the small but growing e-book publisher Wynn Press. WynnPress.com creates interactive e-books for web designers. They plan to expand into more design disciplines and marketing tools over the next year. (Photoshop, Illustrator and the love-hate relationship with PowerPoint.)

 

Over the past two years Wynn Press has found success in getting their books adopted by large online colleges. They plan to leverage this success as they roll out new products and try to capture market share among general consumers. Currently the majority of their success has come from word-of-mouth marketing tactics. They have a web site and it is seen as a driver for sales but to they are not tracking or measuring its use. This needs to change. Since a good portion of the site is coded in Flash, and the very important video demos are in Flash, the first step will be to install the Google Analytics SWF so the site can talk to GA and being tracking video views. In the past this was more complicated but now it is a matter of installing some code. (brightcover.com, 2012) Brightcove, the leading online video platform, shares some valuable technical tips on this process. Link below:  

http://support.brightcove.com/en/video-cloud/docs/integration-google-analytics - Measuring demo video views and their bounce rates to purchase rates will help Wynn Press know if their demos are working or need to be reworked. Collecting this data will not be difficult and should provide valuable insight on visitor behavior.

In addition to tracking how many people watch their demo videos and how many views convert to sales Wynn Press needs to understand how visitors are getting to their site. GA offers as set of tools under their Traffic Sources section that can provide this information.  The Traffic Source tools breaks down visitor traffic into three categories:

1)   Direct Traffic – Visits that go straight to their site through either typing in a URL into the browser's address bar, clicking on a bookmark or clicking on a link in an email, SMS, or chat message. (Roggio, 2011)

2)   Referral Traffic – Visitors that click on a link for a different site, like a social media platform, and land on the Wynn Press site.

3)   Search Engine Traffic – Visitors that comes from clicking on links on a search results page for any search engine. This traffic is broken down into two parts, paid and organic. Wynn Press is not engaging in any AdWord campaigns or paid searches so they would be focused on the organic and referral traffic.  (Roggio, 2011)

As the data is collected the report can identify top performing traffic sources and if they fall under four distinct mediums; direct, organic, referral or cpc (cost-per-click). If Wynn Press sees a spike of activity due to Facebook referrals then they can begin to develop a tailored campaign strategy to leverage that platform and be intentional about tracking its success or failure. If there is a steady flow of traffic coming from organic searches then they should dig into which key words are driving the traffic.  Another tactic that can be applied is to measure the bounce rate of each source. If organic searches are driving a lot of traffic to the site but the visitor immediately exists there may be a problem with key words.  

If implemented Google Analytics Traffic Sources will help Wynn Press be competitive and meet their long-term goals as they gain a stronger understanding of who their customer is and where they are coming from.

Google Analytics, social media metrics and me.

As I review these tools and think of my long-term goals a few rise to the top. I am currently working on a series of resources that will help potential design students and their parents navigate the ever-changing and competitive landscape of Colleges and Universities offering art and design degrees. I plan to use a blog and wide range of social media platforms as part of my communication strategy. Google Analytics Social Sources tools will allow me to see which social media sources are doing the heavy lifting. This data can provide a clear path on which platform should get the majority of my time.

To help me understand the data Social Sources will breakdown social media activity into 6 reports:

1)   Overview

2)   Sources

3)   Pages

4)   Conversions

5)   Social Plugins

6)   Social Visitor Flow

Let’s take a closer look at 4 of these reports:

1)   Overview – Provides a mini-dashboard of the social reports and their data. It also includes a social value visualization which will pinpoint how the social networks contribute to website conversions. (Waisberg, 2012)

2)   Sources – This tracks source activity based on social referrers. It will keep track of all of the URL options associated with each social network. An example would be witter.com and t.co. (Waisberg, 2012

3)   Pages – This report shows social activity on each page of your site. (Sharif, 2012) If someone likes my page on how to handle tuition costs and share this on Facebook and LinkedIn it will show up on this report. (Sharif, 2012)

4)   Conversions – This report provides an overview of which social sources drove conversions to the site. It will show the data in comparison to my set goals and ecommerce, providing an overview of which social source is creating the most value. (Waisberg, 2012)

Google Analytics and these Social Sourcing reports are working hard to make it easy for me to track and measure the effectiveness of my social media strategy. As marketers become more familiar with social media platforms and their analytics it should become even easier to understand the true value of the channel. Finding the true value of social media is hotly debated topic by the industry. Dan Zarrella of HubSpot recently released a formula on the value of a ‘like’. This formula (VOLA) combines and crunches numbers associated with Total Likes (L), Unlikes-per-month (UpM), Likes-per-Day (LpD), Average Clicks (C, Conversion Rates (CR) and Average Conversion Rate (ACV). By using Google Analytics and his custom calculator (ValueOfALike.com) he is trying to help us “understand exactly what the value of each social networking connection is to our bottom line.” (Zarrella, 2012) The tool has been met with praise and criticism.

I plan to try it in the future and share it here to reinforce my final thought, which is this; the process of analyzing and measuring digital strategy and online consumer behavior is a living ecosystem.  It is constantly changing due a wide range of variables, tangents, trends and technology. Google Analytics provides an entry way into this wonderfully complicated world of data. Both Children’s Relief International and Wynn Press should make the effort to engage these tools and start measuring the analytics of their sites.  They should start off with clear and simple goals. Find out where the traffic is coming from, figure out what pages have high bounce rates and keep and eye on how social media is impacting traffic. These are not complicated goals and if measured consistently over time they should net positive results. It will be an important step for their long-term success.  I know I plan to use these tools as I develop those resources I intend to share with students and their families. The past 5 weeks has me feeling ambitious and I am ready to embrace the task. Looking forward to seeing what the next 4 weeks will bring.

References:

www.brightcove.com

Cutroni. Justin, (2011, October 19^th) Path Analysis in Google Analytics with Flow Visualization. Retrieved on November 26^th, 2012 from http://cutroni.com/blog/2011/10/19/path-analysis-in-google-analytics-with-flow-visualization/

Gianoglio, Jim. (2011, October 19) Flow Visualization in Google Analytics. Retrieved on November 26^th, 2012 from http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2011/10/19/flow-visualization-google-analytics/

N.A. Joe, (2011, October 19^th) Top 5 Use Cases of Goggle Analytics Flow Visualization. Retrieved on November 26^th, 2012 from http://www.blastam.com/blog/index.php/2011/10/ga-flow-visualization-use-cases/

N.A. (N.D.) Video Cloud Support: Integration with Google Analytics. Retrieved on November 26^th, 2012 from http://support.brightcove.com/en/video-cloud/docs/integration-google-analytics

Roggio. Armando, (2011, July 18^th) Understanding ‘Traffic Sources’ in Google Analytics. Retrieved on November 26^th, 2012 from  http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/2916-Understanding-Traffic-Sources-in-Google-Analytics

Sharif. Sayf, (2012, March 29^th) Tracking your social engagement with Google Analytics. Retrieved on November 26^th, 2012 from http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2012/03/29/tracking-social-google-analytics/

Waisberg. Daniel, (2012, March 20th) Google Analytics Launches New Social Reports To Measure Social ROI. Retrieved on November 26^th, 2012 from http://marketingland.com/google-analytics-social-reports-8138

Waisberg. Daniel, (2011, October 19^th) Google Analytics Gains “Napoleon’s March” Flow Visualization Charts. Retrieved on November 26^th, 2012 from http://searchengineland.com/google-analytics-flow-visualization-97066

Zarrella. Dan, (2012, November 26^th) How to calculate the value of a like. Retrieved on November 26^th, 2012 from http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/11/how_to_calculate_the_value_of.html

www.wynnpress.com

www.childrensrelief.com