One of the minor annoyances with the introduction with Bing is that all the tools currently used has to be updated (assuming of course you care about MSN/Live/Bing for your work). The sad reality of all this is that Google Analytics has yet to update its system to include Bing as a standard search engine–even Omniture has done this!

Maybe it’s Google just thinking “eh, with all the mistakes on it currently, they’ll just rename it again anyway?”

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With any program there will be quirks that one has to learn either through trial and error or just common usage and Google Analytics has some of these aspect as well.

• Visits / Entrances: Visits are mostly used within the Traffic Sources section whereas Entrances are used within the Content section. The quirk about these two metrics is that they capture the same kind of data–essentially a session entry into the site. Therefore, if you check the number of entrances in the Top Landing Pages in Top Content and then go to Traffic Sources and segment by Landing Pages, the numbers between Visits and Entrances are the same.
• IP Addresses: One can include or exclude IP addresses (say for the purpose of excluding or including internal traffic), but if you want to find out what IP addresses you may want to segment, this cannot be done within any profile. Not sure if it is possible even with GA’s API.
• Page Titles: Google Analytics can pull page titles as a way to view duplicate page titles, but you cannot view your Meta Descriptions for the same purpose as well.
• Ad Slot Position: PPC can see whether the PPC ad is displayed on the top or on the right hand side, and yet, cannot actually optimize the ads to be placed in those specific positions. Oh, and of course, no ability for SEO to see their keyword positions

Any other quirks noticed?

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Quick note that if you want to learn a quick way to use advanced segments within Google Analytics for eCommerce, I strongly suggest heading over to the Google Analytics Blog.

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I forgot to mention this previously, but wanted to point out that even for someone like myself who is very into web analytics and is always thinking about how to use analytics for my clients, that even I learned a few tips (or inspired some as well) from the videos on Avinash’s post about some actionable web analytics video tips.

Ironically though, the third video with Avinash’s top tip did not supply me any new ideas or tips such as the first two. It is not that his thoughts were not good (they very well certainly are), it was just that I had already thought of those things already for goal values on my own.

Nonetheless, I highly recommend the viewing of all three videos if you want to learn more about how to use web analytics on a higher level.

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If your first thought of President Barack Obama’s new White House website change is the above title of this post or even a “Wow! That looks nice,” it is time to update the look of your company’s website. Within an hour of Obama’s inauguration, the White House website underwent a whole site redesign to look as the following:

The site redesign is not perfect (I am allowed to have some quibbles) as it could have some stronger call-to-actions, SEO, etc., however, considering this is a government website, the design is very well done.

This only raises the bar for full-service interactive advertising agencies dealing in creative, heurestic analyses, and SEO all around, I will attest to that.

Oh, and the site is using WebTrends:

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I wonder if Web Analytics companies have to go through the same bidding process as contractors do?

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Custom reports for Google Analytics, though second best in my opinion to the advanced segmentation filters in the latest update, provides some rather helpful and great uses for the rabid Google Analytics user. The Google Analytics blog provides some tips about what to use the custom reports for:

• Combining metrics from multiple reports
• Creating relevant drilldowns
• Simplifying reports to share with colleagues

With any new feature (or really with any features) there are going to be limitations so keep in mind how to combine metrics and dimensions. I have run across some of the limitations below:

• You unfortunately cannot directly create a Landing Pages & Visits custom report–Entrances (which is really the same thing), yes. But otherwise, you either have to drilldown by landing page in the traffic sources section (which, honestly, I have some qualms about) or within the custom report put in the other values you want, create the report, and then do the drilldown.
• Just about anything with AdWords data–sadly, the data within Analytics (when its linked) comes from AdWords and not through Google Analytics so it cannot be modified (that is, the click data) in important ways.
• Ecommerce Conversion Rate–I honestly have no clue why this is not in there when the custom report has average value and per visit value, but there you have it.

Nonetheless, there are a variety of useful custom reports that you can create and to throw in some fun, albeit more for data research, I can create the following:

• Ad Slot Position & Keywords (and vice versa)–I now know where my keywords show up in a far more useful manner to see whether the PPC ads being clicked on are coming from what position and which side of Google’s SERPs (Can I please beg someone at Google Analytics to provide the same information for SEO?). I can then see how the positions conversion rates are doing for each keyword. More for data research as AdWords has some of this information already and that PPC cannot change their bids based on top of the SERPs versus the right hand side.
• Keyword Visits & Bounces–If you ever want to see a depressing custom report, look no further than a custom report that removes all keyword visits that did not result in a bounce (or one that has all bounces).
• Browser & Per Visit Value–Should you really care about Mac Safari users? You may find that although they may account for a small version of your site traffic, the amount of revenue they generate per visit may necessitate you creating a website that works for the top browsers & computers.

If you are new to custom reports, be sure to check out the Google Analytics video below:

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The debate rages on within the online marketing community over the benefits or lack thereof over a social media campaign. I had not planned to delve deep into social media marketing, but due to the growing interest around the net, I thought I would provide a social media marketing analysis after providing you some of the talk around the town.

Aaron Wall jumped into the frayed displaying his general antipathy towards the benefits of social media (with a few exceptions):

A pity, then, that social media traffic is so often worthless.

Worthless?

Let’s look at the market signals. Why is it that you pay dollars per click on Google Adwords for financial keywords, yet the same keywords on social networks are priced at five cents?

This suggests to me one of two things. Either the social networks are seriously underestimating the value of their own traffic, or most of the people on social networks aren’t interested in commercial messages. If they were, then the bid values would closely match those of Google Adwords.

I think the latter is the most likely scenario. Social media traffic isn’t priced higher, because it isn’t translating into revenue for the advertisers. This isn’t happening because the intent of the users when engaged with social media is not conducive to selling stuff.

The pro-social media side believes that social media marketing is still in the infancy of many online marketers and deserves attention for a variety of reasons.

My feelings on the matter are a bit nuanced considering my strong belief in the ability to accurately track, analyze, and optimize any kind of campaign.

Mainly, we have to understand what the goals are going to exactly be for a social media marketing campaign without which any social media marketing campaign will be an instant failure (no game plan = no strategy = no benefits). Let’s look at some examples of the types of strategies that a social media campaign may focus on:

Branding:

Also known as driving ‘awareness’ about your company or client. These are probably the most difficult kinds of campaigns for any analytics and for any marketer to track to determine success. For the most part, there are no easy ways to determine the value generated from the cost inputted by a social media marketing campaign. Many of the desired measures are calculations that are often not looked at deeply enough by online marketers. Honestly, how many of the online marketers are going to look into whether a social media marketing campaign is helping to improve the lifetime value of a customer (much less take the time to track it)? Furthermore, you would have to base an overall base lift in brand conversions as the benefit in the social media branding campaign as an early indicator of success. For major brands, this is likely to be the value they look at in order to keep up the interest and value of ‘fanatic’ customers who are brand loyal and desire to be involved with said brand. Retaining these loyal customers would be a success in my opinion (assuming the cost-benefit ratio is good).

SEO:

As a Search Strategist, I will have a strong bias here that may effect my opinion in this matter, but will comment on this anyway. To me, if there was any reason to do social media marketing, then it would be doing social media SEO marketing. Period. I believe that using social media marketing (in the right way) for SEO will likely get the best bang for the buck. However, one has to be careful as many of the social media sites have a dim view of what SEO does. Nonetheless, a successful social media SEO marketing campaign would include driving high-value backlinks into the clients’ websites all in an effort to drive up visibility for the desire keywords. Admittedly, clients that are more interesting and able to entice customers to link to odd stuff helps make my life as an search strategist far easier.

Revenue:

If you are trying to generate revenue directly from social media, stop. In fact, you have a greater chance selling those products that “protect” you from electromagnetic radiation than generating revenue directly from a social media revenue campaign. People just do not want to be disturbed or marketed directly in their niche social media club. All the analytics data continues to show that anyone coming from these sites have the greatest bounce rate and lowest time on site from any other marketing channel. The time and effort it takes to “infiltrate” a social media networking or build something for social media will rarely, if ever, be made up in revenue directly from these sites. Indirect revenue, is a whole other matter, but will often lack the analytical capacity to track (exception potentially being about my article on Nuconomy and Social Media Analytics).

Traffic:

This section is more for content-based sites that require eyeballs viewing a page to provide revenue generated through advertisements displayed on a page or in a video. These would be the areas where traffic is not a cost, but an asset, particularly if it leads into branding (eg: getting into the top X number of sites by traffic). Nonetheless, the traffic generated will be of poor quality (one page view, short time on site, with a quick bounce) that may not be worth the cost in the end. Unless the niche market targeted for a social media traffic campaign is large enough, then focusing on social media here may turn out to be Pyrrhic gold.

In the end, keep in mind what your strategy will be for a social media marketing campaign, have an analytics package that will be able to back you up (not necessarily something one has to build), and really, best of luck in getting it to work successfully. The belief in not needing to measure will lead to inaccurate assumptions about the success of a campaign or what you can learn from the campaign as well.

As a side note, if you want to understand one of the reasons for the Dot Com Boom and Bust, it truly was the belief in the following concept:

[Traditional] roi is a financial metric but social media is not traditional.

In otherwords, the online world does not follow the same rules as the “traditional” or offline world. It was a flawed concept during the 1990s and it is a flawed concept still today.

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Just seems I cannot blog about anything else as I keep finding more mistakes around the web today. I go to search for some examples for a post about people being confused between organic results and paid results, and instead I find the following results when I search for the phrase “analytics” in Google:

Let’s first ignore the fact that Google Analytics ranks number one in its SERPs with sitelinks as a potential conflict of interest there (that is a whole other topic), but instead focus on the aspect that www.google.com has three sites ranking!

For the uninitiated in SEO, for every given keyword, you are allowed up to two pages ranking per sub-domain (exception are the sitelinks above). So, just how and why is Google ranking three?

It looks like Google is still having problems with differentiating secured and non-secured HTTP pages around the web and incidentally ranking secured pages as a whole other sub-domain (or site). I have had clients previously deal with these issues usually in a negative situation where the secured homepage would rank instead of the non-secured in a lower position.

Yet, here in the case for Google, with such a high PageRank on both “sites,” it is only an additional benefit for them to get around the two sub-domain pages per keyword limit. Not bad considering it’s a one-phrase keyword.

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People often believe that when something is free, it means two things: 1) Not very good, 2) No competition or a need to update.

As I have previously mentioned about the Golden Age of Analytics with Google Analytics, point one is entirely false as Google has recently been able to really up its game within the web analytics arena by providing some really spectacular online marketing features that will benefit many agencies that take advantage of it. I finally now have access with it for some of my clients and will be salivating through it for probably the next month until I can squeeze just about everything I can from it (my poor GA representative will get to know me over the next month as I call with lots of questions, lol). Go install it after you read this post.

This post tackles the second part with Nuconomy coming out with something that no other qualifiable web analytics package has to date–the ability to track social media traffic and the correlation with them. Now, I know what you should be thinking: Social media does not convert! There is no direct ROI in it. But the counter-argument would be that there is a branding effect, a talking effect, customer interactions, etc. that cannot be measured. Yet, what Nuconomy has done is put their money where their mouth is, tracking those exact effects. Now you can find out whether or not there is an indirect impact for your company and if not, leave the social media fanatics with only this:

So, what do I think is the most important factor in a social media strategy?  Social Media

When competing against a free product or service, you have to be able to market yourself for niche areas, innovate to stay ahead of the pack, and listen to what your customers want. This is where Omniture SiteCatalyst has seriously failed as a Web Analytics provider–it fails to listen to customer complaints (slow load time) and it fails to stay ahead of the pack by not placing in basic SEO tracking that Google Analytics offers for free.

So please, check them out, but do not join the beta–I’m trying to get into that, do not want more competition than there already is to get on that list.

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The announcement of Google Analytics’s new features provided for free will radically shake up the web analytics field for any agency seriously considering or working in the online advertising arena. In my opinion, what used to be a very niche and expensive area will be suddenly available at a far lower cost and to a far larger amount of people leading to a kind of golden age in web data analysis.

The older data analysis through log servers or bulky web analytics packages force companies to spend thousands or millions of dollars every year that often required a programming level of skill such as Sql (sp?) or at the least RegEx (something I had to learn originally for Google Analytics). Google Analytics new features removes the need for such a skill level and brings the ability to provide detailed analyses to a larger amount of people who can quickly and effectively test many kinds of problems, solutions, or findings.

Yes, there will still be a need for the higher level of deep data analysis, but in terms of needing to run an online marketing campaign as efficiently and profitably as possible, Google has opened the floodgates to make this a reality without having to either have a programmer do everything for you or sit and wait on the incredibly slow bulky analytics packages.

I can now run analyses across multiple accounts by the same client in an effort to see if there is an on-going relationship between multiple online marketing channels without having to download the data and do a large amount of data merging with data crunching. In need of an ad hoc report or a hopefully brilliant idea came to mind to test? Google Analytics allows the ability to quickly test the idea without having to get someone else to run it for you or to wait on the data to be collected. The speed at which web analytics data can be analyzed has been reduced dramatically, which in turn should make data analysis as interesting as someone doing analysis within Microsoft Excel. In fact, if you know how to do custom filters in Microsoft Excel, you will find the advanced segmentation in Google Analytics very familiar.

All this analysis brings higher level analysis down to a simpler level—those that quickly jump on this wagon of web data analysis will be the first out of the gate—particularly if a culture is set up—and will win the day in the web’s hyper-competitive environment.

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