Online Marketing Blog » Web Analytics

Three Major Types of Goals in Google Analytics

George — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 12:08:46 +0000

In Google Analytics, goals are one of the best features that allow us to go deeper into a website’s traffic performance and fix any possible issues. It helps you to track how users go through various pages or sections of your website. Goals help us to see how users travel once coming on your website or how users are reaching a particular section of your website.

Setting up goals with Google Analytics also helps you to make sure that the visitor has done what you would like them to do on your website. For example if you have a shopping cart then your ultimate aim is to make the users purchase your products. Mostly the last page that a user reaches after purchasing anything online would be a “Thank You” page and by setting a goal for this page, you would be able to understand the amount of successful user visits to your website which have converted into sales. Goals also help you to know more about the user behaviour on your website such as site engagement, user engagement etc.

There are three major types of goals in Google Analytics and you can use it as per your requirement. The three major types of Google Analytics goals are:

1) URL Destination
The URL destination goal type helps you to find out how often users have successfully visited a particular page through various sections on the website. This is mostly a good option in ecommerce sites and other websites whose aim is to get sales or leads through the website. You can also set goal funnels to see how the users come to your goal page and you can set multiple goal funnels for your website.

2) Time on Site
The Time on Site goal helps you to understand how many times a user spends a particular amount of time on your website. This goal clearly gives an idea about the user behaviour once he visit your sites and you would know whether the user spend a particular amount of time on your website or not. This would help you to understand about the potentiality of your website in keeping the users for a longer period of time and you could make necessary changes on your website as per this data.

3) Pages per Visit
This option helps you to know about the depth of user visit on your website. You could know how many pages a user have visited your goal page and you could set a particular number of pages for this which seems good for you. This is also very much effective in calculating the overall user engagement on your website.

It is very much easy to set up a goal for your website using Google Analytics and you can do it from the settings area of your Analytics account. In the settings area of your Google Analytics account, you can see the option to add goals and you can create goals that are most suited to the nature of your website.

How to Enable e-Commerce Reports in Google Analytics

George — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 06:01:45 +0000

Google Analytics is obviously one of the most powerful free web analytics tool that is available and most of the webmasters rely upon Google Analytics for tracking the traffic and other activities on the websites. One of the most amazing feature of Google Analytics is its ability to track activities such as online transactions, especially for ecommerce websites. Google Analytics’ ability to track sales on a website makes is a pretty good and useful web analytics tool. Most of the ecommerce websites take advantage of this facility and this helps to analyse and track the sales and its progress.
Google Analytics does not automatically allow the tracking of sales that take place on your ecommerce website, rather you need to put a small piece of code on your website in order to get the e-commerce report tracking enabled. Once you enable the ecommerce tracking, you will be able to get a complete picture in terms of sales by category, by channel revenues, revenue per keyword, conversion rate, media etc.

Below are the steps that need to be followed in order to enable the ecommerce report tracking in Google Analytics.

- Login to Your Google Analytics account
- Click on ‘Edit’ next to the profile you want to enable
- In the Profile Settings page, click on “Edit” next to Main Website Profile Information
- Change the E-commerce Website radio button from ‘No’ to ‘Yes’
- Get a special tracking code that is to be installed onto the website.
- Get a developer to install the special tracking code provided by Google onto the website.
- Wait for around 24 hours to start seeing the ecommerce reports.

7 Useful Tips for Reducing the Bounce Rate of Your Website

George — Thu, 19 May 2011 03:43:05 +0000

Bounce rate is one of the crucial criteria in Web Analytics, which determines the overall quality of your website. Bounce rate is one of the main things that one would like to see while viewing the web analytics stats, especially in Google Analytics. Usually a website having a high bounce rate is not considered as a healthy indication. As mentioned in the Google Support Forum, bounce rate is considered as the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which a visitor has left your site from the entrance page. If your website or web page does not have any thing useful to offer, then it is quite natural that the visitor flees away from the site without going into other pages.

On the other hand if your website have something interesting and compelling stuff to offer, then the users would definitely stick on the website and subsequently navigate to the other sections of the website. If your website makes visitors stay on the website for a longer period, then the bounce rate of your website is sure to come down.

There are various things that can be done so as to bring down the bounce rate of a website. Some are simple ones while few steps needs more hard work, research and dedication. I would like to share few of the tips that I consider would be helpful in reducing the bounce rate of a website.

1) Improve the quality of the content
Lack of quality content can often make visitors to leave your website immediately, leading to higher bounce rate. If you have informative content on your website, then users may stay for some time on the website and may even navigate to different sections of the website. This case would help you in improving the bounce rate of your website.

2) Make Easy Website Navigation Structure
Making an user friendly website navigation structure helps visitors to easily navigate through the website and this would help in reducing the website bounce rate to a great extend. On the other hand if the website navigation structure is not user friendly, the visitors may not try to navigate through the different section of the website, which inturn leads to high bounce rate.

3) Improve the Website Loading Time
Most of the time, visitors rarely spend their valuable time on a website which takes too much time to load completely and this leads to increased bounce rate. So if you improve the loading time of your website, it can surely help you in improving the bounce rate of your website.

4) Avoid unwanted pop ups and external tool bars on the web site
There are certain websites which throws up pop ups and external tool bar once a visitor reaches the website. Seeing these annoying pop ups, majority of the visitors leaves the website leading to increased bounce rate. So if these things are avoided, you can really improve the bounce rate of your website.

5) Remove videos or images that causes distraction
It is generally a good ideas to include images or videos on a website. But if the videos or images are causing any type of distraction to the visitors, it may again result in visitors leaving the website. So make sure that the images and videos does not cause any disturbance to the visitors and if you find that they are causing any type of disturbances, then simply remove them from the website.

6) Implement a site search box on the web site
Users always love to search for stuffs on any website and if you have a search box included in your website, it would really help them. While searching through the site search box, the visitors would be staying for a longer time on the website resulting in improved bounce rate.

7) Work on the Keywords that Results on High Bounce Rates
In the web analytics dashboard, just go through the keywords that drives traffic to your website. In these keywords, just see which keywords are causing increased bounce rate. When visitors land on your website with these keywords, they might not be getting anything informative or interesting content on your website related to those keywords, resulting in immediate termination from the website. This will surely increase the bounce rate and this is an area you need to pay more attention. Analyze the keywords causing high bounce rate, and modify your content to make it more informative and interesting. You can also create separate web pages for these keywords.

How to Grant Other Users Access to your Google Analytics Account

George — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 04:07:35 +0000

Google Analytics is one of the best free tool to track your website traffic and is the most used tool by webmasters. The tool is free to install and you are able to view much precise information about your website traffic. Since Web Analytics plays a major role in SEO campaigns, most of the webmasters try to install an Analytics code into their or client’s website. Creating a Google Analytics account is so easy and you just need to have a valid Gmail account and can login with your Gmail account details.

A website should have only one Analytics code installed within it and the presence of more than one code would end up in wrong reports. Consider that you have installed Google Analytics code for your client from your own account or vise versa. In both cases only one party can view the results and this creates confusion between you and your client. So it is always better if there is any option to share your Analytics details with your client or vise versa.

One of the major feature of Google Analytics is that it lets you to grant access to other persons to view the reports of the websites which comes under your Google Analytics account. With this feature you just need to add the second party as a user with your account and the second party can view the Analytics report of his website by logging into his own Analytics account. The steps to grant access another person the privilege to view your Analytics account are simple and is listed below.

1) Log on to you Analytics account

2) On your Analytics dashboard there would be a list of Analytics account in a table. Click on the link of the Analytics account you wish to grant access to others and you would enter another page.

3)In the new page you can see a list of websites listed under that particular account in a table. Below the table you can see a link “User Manager” which you need to click.

4) After clicking on the “User Manager” link, you would be directed to a new page named “User Manager” and you can see a table which has a link named “Add user” on the top.

5)Click on the link named “Add user” and you will now enter a page named “Create New User For Access”. Here you can enter the email address of the person to whom you wish to grant access to your particular Analytics data.

6) After entering the email address you can specify the access type. Basically there are 2 types of access types namely “View Reports Only” and “Account Administrator”. Select the one that is required.

7) There is another table in the same page which contains the list of websites in that particular account. You just need to select the website to which you wish to grant access.

8)After selecting the website, just click on the button named “Save Changes” given at the bottom and the process is completed.

Now the person to whom you have granted access can view the Analytics data of your website, by logging into his Analytics account.

How to View the Time of Visit in Google Analytics

George — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 06:03:57 +0000

How to View the Time of Visit in Google Analytics? This is one of the common questions that is asked in web analytics, even though the answer is quite simple. There are many other free as well as paid analytics tool which are capable of providing the time of a particular visit. This has lead to many people asking whether we can get the time of the visits to our website. Yes, Google analytics provide the option to see the time of visits to some extent, which gives you an idea of the number of visit in a particular time. But Google does not give a detailed time report of the visit such as the exact hour and minute of any visit. It can show you the number of visit in a particular time frame.

Viewing the Time of Visit in Google Analytics is really simple but is rarely explored by common man. First you need to open your Google analytics account of your particular website and initially you would be on the dashboard of your analytics account. To see the time for your visits click on the “Visitors” option in the main dashboard and you can see a list of sub links such as Overview, Benchmarking, Map Overlay, New Vs Returning, Language etc under this. Now Click on the link “Visitor Trending” under the “Visitors” option and again you can see a list of sub links such as Visits, Absolute Unique Visitors, Pageviews, Average Pageviews, Time on Site, Bounce Rate etc. From these options, click on the link “Visit” and you can see the total number of visits to your website on each day. By default it shows up for the last 30 days and you can see the total number of visits in the regular chart format as well as a bar format under the regular chart. This bar diagram also shows the number of visits on a particular day along with the overall percentage. You will not feel anything new in this as you always come across this section while drilling through your analytics account.

In the regular graphical chart for the visit per each day, you can see 4 buttons on the top right of the chart below the date range section. The names of these 4 buttons are Hour, Day, Week and Month respectively. You can see the names while you move your mouse over these buttons. Now click on the button named Hour which has a logo resembling a clock. After clicking on this button you can see the hour wise distribution of visits. With this you cannot know the exact time of the visit, but you can get an idea of how much visits your website got during a particular hour. Such an information is really helpful while studying the website behavior. It would be much better if Google is able to provide the minute wise distribution of visits. Hope that Google Analytics would provide more precise data on the time of the visits in the near future.

Google Analytics Intelligence – An Introduction

George — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 17:18:58 +0000

Google Analytics Intelligence was introduced few months back and this has turned out be something handy for those who keep a close watch on their website’s traffic. Google Analytic Intelligence is a feature which helps to create alerts based on certain criteria. Google Analytics Intelligence consist of two types of alerts and they are Automatic Alerts and Custom Alerts.

Automatic Alert create alert based on any unusual behavior in your website’s traffic. For example if on a particular day the average time spend on the website is too high or low than the expected average time, then Google Analytics would create an Automatic alert. You can also set Custom Alert based on the criteria that you specify. You can also have the option get these alerts via mail and these alerts are send daily, weekly or monthly.

The below video gives you some more insight into Google Analytics Intelligence, and how the Custom Alert and Automatic Alerts work.

Using Google Analytics Does not Have Negative Effects on Rankings

George — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 14:37:22 +0000

Will Using Google Analytics Have A Negative Effect On My Ranking? This question have been asked a several times on many search forums and people were really feared if there is something that would affect their search ranking with the use of Google Analytics. In the latest Google Analytics Blog Post, Matt Cutts has answered this query and the answer is a big no. There is no way that Google Analytics usage would affect your search engine rankings.

People have always complained that the use of Google Analytics code on their web page increases the load time of their website. This makes their website appear to be slow and since Google takes the web site speed into account while ranking a website, many webmasters were left confused. But as per Matt Cutts Google Analytics’ new asynchronous Java script code avoids the issue of load time and it makes the website more faster. None of the data from Google Analytics is taken into account for determining the search engine ranking of a particular website and it is pretty safe to use Google Analytics to track your website.

Watch the Video by Matt Cutts regarding this.

Is Google Analytics Result Influenced by System Clock?

George — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 06:24:54 +0000

As we all know, Google Analytics is one of the most used free web analytics software around with a lot of features. Majority of the websites uses Google Analytics software to track its traffic and other user behaviors. Google Analytics has become one of the most integral tool of every online marketing activities.

One of the major disadvantage of Google analytics is that it does not show real time traffic data and always shows a time lag of few hours. There are many other analytic tools which show real time data, but Google overcome these with the depth of its traffic data reporting and a clean user interface.

One thing I came to notice is that to some extend Google Analytics results are influenced by our System clock time. I came to sense this when I tested my Analytics account from home and my office. The system clock in my home is Indian time and when I view Google Analytics data, I get data with few hour lags but I am able to see the data of that particular date. For eg. If I am viewing Google Analytics data on 7th July, I can see the data for that date except for few time lag.

Now the system clock in my office has a difference of almost 18 hours due to the nature of my work. When I access Google Analytics from my office I see a huge difference in the time lag and even the data that I see shows a difference of 1 day when compared with the analytics data that I see from home. For eg. if I access the analytics from my office on the same day (7th July), the analytics data shows report till 6th July only. This is almost making a difference of more than 24 hours.

This means that Google Analytics is also somewhat taking the system clock time into account while showing reports. I searched on the net regarding this issue, but could not find a proper answer for the same. If anybody knows more details about this, please let me know.

Track 404 Error Pages Effectively with Google Analytics

George — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:41:01 +0000

404 Error Pages are created inorder to notify visitors that they have landed on a page which does not exist. This can happen when either the visitor have typed the wrong URL or the user have reached a broken link from an external or internal link. Like we use Google Analytics to track traffic for different pages of a website by pasting the Google Analytics code on every pages of a website, we can also track the number of visitors coming to the 404 error page.

But 404 error page views are always a concern for webmaster, since they are not aware of what the user actually typed or what they were looking for when they landed on the 404 error page. By getting all these information, a webmaster would be able to either create a new page for a particular topic that the user searched and landed on an error page or fix the broken link.

These information can be gathered to some extend by adding a small piece of code to the regular Google Analytics code. The basic steps for getting this is mentioned below.

1) Make sure that the 404 error page has Google Analytics installed.
2) Now modify the existing Google Analytics code in the 404 error page as given below.

By adding this code a virtual page view of “/404.html?page=[pagename.html?queryparameter]&from=[referrer]” is send to your account, where [pagename.html?queryparameters] represents the missing page name and referrer is the URL of the page from where the user reached the 404 error page.

3) Now got to your Google Analytics dashboard and select the Top Content tab.

4) In the Top Content report look for /404.html page. Now you can see more detailed report regarding your 404 error page traffic and there by improve your site quality.

This has worked for me and hope you can also benefit from this code.

Creating Advanced Segment for a Geographical Region with Google Analytics

George — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 03:34:13 +0000

Google Analytics is one of the most powerful and free web analytics tool available and is much better than many other free web analytics softwares available. Google analytics is not a hosted web analytics tool, but is just a compatible javascript code which needs to be included between the tag of an HTML page.

Google Analytics is so flexible and user friendly Internet analytics tool and comes with a variety of customized report options. In this post I would like to write about how to create an Advanced Segment for a particular geographical region with Google website analytics tool.

Consider that you have a website and have installed Google Analytics code to track the traffic details. You need to know the top landing pages or top content from the city “Kuala Lumpur”. In this case you can take the advantages of advanced segments in Google Analytics. The steps for setting up an advanced segment for a particular geographical region in this cases is given below.

1) On your Google Analytics Dashboard there is a link named “Advanced Segments” in a box named “My Customizations” on the left hand side. Click on the link named “Advanced Segments”.

2) After step 1 you will be taken to a new page and click on the link named “Create new custom segment” on the top right.

3) You can see a box named “Dimensions” on the left with several links. Click on the link named “Visitors”.

4) A new drop down will be displayed with several metrics. Drag the metric named “City” to the box named “dimension or metric” on the centre of the page.

5) Make the “Condition” as “Matches exactly”.

6) Type or select the city name “Kuala Lumpur” from the drop down menu.

7) Name the Segment as “Visits from Kuala Lumpur”.

8) Finally click the “Create Segment” button.

Now you have successfully set up Advanced Segment for the geographic location “Kuala Lumpur”. To see the segmented report go to “Content” and click on the “Top Content” link. Now you can see a section named “Advanced Segments: All Visits” above the top right of the graph. Click on the down arrow and check the box corresponding to “Visits from Kuala Lumpur” in Custom Segments and click on the Apply button.

Now the Google Analytics Graph will show the overall visits in blue and the “Visits from Kuala Lumpur” in orange. The statistical table below now shows Page views for each page containing All Visits and “Visits from Kuala Lumpur”. This type of segmentation would help you in effectively analyzing your traffic to your pages from a particular geographical location. Hope you will find it interesting and don’t forget to try this out on your Analytics account.