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One of the key steps in the creative process when designing a website is to think of the different desired paths you want users to go through in order to convert. Sure you can get expensive journey analytics tools, but that isn't practical or cheap. Google's out of box reporting: the navigation summary report is very limiting and the behavior flow report can look a bit clunky. So what's an analyst like you to do?  Our Story Problem Let's look at an example involving an online retailer that just designed a new site. They'd like users to first land on their homepage, learn about their business and products, go to a categories page to choose specific products, then get to a product detail page and buy. The trick is that they are realistic in that they know that people do their research. They want to know if their users are doing this across multiple sessions to buy, not just one session. If they know this then they know the journey they want users to take is wor...

Greetings Degurgitators! It's been a minute, hasn't it? I've had a few things going on outside of the professional life that's kept me busy. One of the greatest things happening to me is that my oldest is starting Kindergarten. I'm beyond a blessed dad.  But let's get right into it. I want to talk about how to escape the tinkering mentality of your website. Those onesie-twosie things you think that are just going to raise conversion rates just might not be what you think will happen. I'm not saying that certain small changes won't help exactly, but often times those types of changes happen with testing around a specific goal. How does this happen? This often happens when thorough objectives, goals, and measurement strategy isn't really there. I'll often hear that the goal is to "make more money" or to "sell more **blank**". That isn't rooted in any specific strategy. What's more difficult is that it's...

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, might be the most used term in all digital marketing, but the least understood. I'm not saying people don't understand what it is (the practice of optimizing your websites to reach higher on search engine results pages, or SERPs), but more importantly how to measure and optimize it to get to those higher rankings. In this post, I'm going to give you the 5 best reports in Google Analytics you should have at your disposal to track the performance of your web site's SEO performance. 1) Organic Keywords I'm breaking this out in "a" and "b" - you'll see why a) Google Analytics - Organic Keywords Report This is a great report that shows you all of the keywords that search engines are receiving from users to get to your site. What's really good is that if you have your goals or eCommerce setup, you can see which words really drive your bottom line. Inversely, maybe you see words that you don't w...

God, I love this picture (disregard the potential fact that this person is taking a picture of a pineapple). This is totally what happens, doesn't it? As consumers we often enjoy going to the store, looking at something we want, then buying it online. The purchase is often based on availability, price, and sometimes maybe both. That is a common behavior and pretty much stinks for the retailer (unless you're Target and can get me to buy a cup of coffee every time I enter that place). The same issues happen even on the web.  The Scenario Let's say you are an online retailer and you produce great content, comparison information, and the pictures of the product are tantalizing. The real issue is that it's very possible that the people that view all that stuff didn't even buy the thing! They come back and love it, but they are waiting and waiting, AND WAITING till the sucker goes on sale. This is a crucial time in the buying process and you need to give them the ...

AdWords is beyond easy to get into, which is refreshing for the most people that don't know sophisticated digital marketing strategy. The biggest questions I've seen when looking at your performance on AdWords are the following: Is this good? Can we show worth and improve? What's working the best and what stinks? Why!?! OK, so number 4 is basically what all of this is about, but you want to understand those others. In this post, I'm going to show you how to understand each of these, and how to improve the program using Google Analytics. The goals? Make more cash. Get more leads. DO BETTER. 1) Is this good? Reviewing AdWords vs Google Analytics Paid Search Performance The first thing you need to understand is the attribution between AdWords and Analytics. AdWords will generally appear higher in conversions tracking than Google Analytics. AdWords basically says "if at any point someone used one of our ads to convert, then we're counting it as a con...

Creating the incentive to buy at your store is a problem for shopping districts and malls. Generally, you'll go in if there is a product you want, but more willing to buy if the barriers to entry are removed. It's not uncommon for this to exist online. Websites are also trying to promote their best products often and in your face. What is sometimes a struggle is for them to feature products the market is actually looking at. This is a great use of your Gooogle Analytics time! In this post, I'm going to detail 3 reporting ideas and show their value (in beautiful gold stars!) for helping you determine which products might be product feature winners. 1) Organic Search Query Analysis ⭐: I spoke to you about setting up Google Search Console for your website in a previous post. If you haven't done that check this tutorial out on Google Search Console . You can choose to integrate it in Google Analytics after you have it set up. Once you do, go to the Search Console fol...

In the first content marketing analytics post we talked about how to analyze videos  to improve the conversion on your website. Most companies, however, can't put a lot of money in video. Instead, they might need to utilize PDFs, Case Studies, Product Brochures, and the like to see if that moved any users to entice a purchase. This post is designed to show you how you can verify the correlation between download and purchase. Step 1: Identify the Key Download Let's assume you have product brochures on your product detail pages. The first step is to see how well those are being downloaded. If they aren't even being downloaded, why continue to use them? Ensure the brochures are set up with Google Event Tracking (if you haven't set these up here's a good tutorial .  I suggest the following setup: Event Category: Product Brochures Event Action: Download Event Label: Product Brochure Name (it can be whatever you name) Assuming you have that setup,...

Forrester defines "customer journey"  as a series of touchpoints by which the customer moves from awareness to engagement to purchase. We can switch purchase to whatever your conversion(s) is, but how do we understand customer journey within web analytics? In this post, I'm going to show you 3 reports in reviewing your customer journey and how to use those insights to drive action for the future. The first thing to note about Google Analytics (and most web analytics platforms) is that they each default to last-click attribution. This type of attribution basically states that the platform is only tracking conversions from the last click from a source. What we need to do is check our total conversions by the channel from a last-click perspective, how each channel assisted in conversion, the top paths people take to convert, and actions to take as a result of the data. 1) Conversions by Channel: Go to Acquisition→All Traffic →Channels From the re...

First impressions are important. To ensure you're making a good one, you should review where most visitors enter and what they first see.   In web analytics, this is called landing page analysis. This post is going to help you to do your own 10-minute analysis of your landing pages, identify what's working, what isn't, and what you can do to improve. Minute 0-2 - The 30k Feet Stage: View the weekly dashboard you have set up and automated so you get a feel for how the website is doing. If you haven't set up the dashboard, check my post on how to create an effective dashboard  in regards to the key modules you require, then use this guide  to build. Don't worry, it's not a show-stopper if you don't have a dashboard. Simply go to Acquisition-All Traffic-Channels within the Google Analytics interface and see which source is doing the best. In my example, I see that most of my traffic is coming from organic search. For those that do not know, organic search...

Dashboard reporting is such an important tool for a company. They could be just what you need to engage all of your employees. At other times a dashboard can showcase a slew of unimportant metrics that get deleted as soon as it enters the inbox. So what constitutes the mix of a good dashboard? You need to ensure that p eople are checking the dashboard regularly based on the interval it is sent (and hopefully more than that!). You also need to be sure the g oals and KPIs reported are directly aligned with the objectives of the business and the questions  and ideas generated by the same people receiving the dashboard are for things such as deeper-dive analyses, or marketing-related activities. From a web analytics perspective, that means you need to focus on digital marketing framework consisting of these 4 components: Traffic↣Engagement↣Acquisition↣Conversion Here's an example of a very simple dashboard you can set up for your users where each column showcases t...

One of the most convoluted parts of a digital marketing strategy is understanding whether the content you use is helping your business. It's not the simplest thing to understand, but I'm hoping as you read this post you think of some ideas how to get the results you need. Measuring digital content effectively using Google Analytics reporting.  First, let's examine a few key rules: 1) The role of marketing: Marketing is about the growth of your business, whether it be by brand awareness, sales, leads, usage or influence. If this is the case, then we need to have goals aligned with key KPIs and metrics to ensure that marketing is doing what we want. 2) The role of content: Content is essentially just information, but the types of content you use can be different, which requires you to think about the different types of data uses to measure it as well as how to present that data to your teams. 3) The role of visitors: Often forgotten is that not all visitors who come ...