Analytics creates the ability to track and measure revenue from a lead to completion focus. The Advanced Analytics session reviewed important metrics to emphasize when analyzing your data to minimize confusion and map your digital business plan.
Conrad Saam, the Director of Marketing at Urbanspoon, discussed analytics from his perspective, which involves translating the data between people who are actually doing it and high level executives. The main points emphasized during his presentation are listed below:
Ranking Reports
Ranking reports can lead to being sidetracked and are becoming increasingly useless. An example that Conrad used during the session involved data for a page titled: Tattoo Story. The ranking report was 63, but the page received a reasonable amount of traffic for that page. About 10% of the traffic terms included “pics”, “photos”, odd characters, specific type of tattoos, misspellings, and the word “tattoo” actually ranked. In reality, this page has proven to be very successful, regardless of the ranking. This demonstrates that page ranking is not a critical element in order for significant traffic to be achieved.
Reporting Structure
In creating reports, critical elements vary depending on keyword. The main elements reported on are listed below with the corresponding keyword type:
- Ubercompetitive/online reputation looking: Ranking
- Head: Traffic
- Long tail: Traffic, Number of Keywords, Number of Entry Pages, and Number of Indexed Pages
Multi Channel Attribution
The Multi Channel Overview demonstrates that direct, organic, referral, social, and other traffic sources are working together to produce conversions. An important element to consider is Assisted vs. Last Conversions – how many times was the user exposed and touched before they converted? Five questions Multi-channel can answer are listed below:
- True ROI for PPC (or any other top of funnel) channel
- Top of funnel keywrods (that actualy convert)
- ID Closer channels
- ID colossally ineffective channels
- Evaluate retargeting effectiveness
Mike Pantoliano is an SEO Consultant at Distilled. His presentation, Making Google Analytics Work For You, explained analytics as a means of making sound business decisions with the data that you have. Google Analytics answers important questions regardless of your web analytics package and offers increased flexibility through event tracking, custom reports, advanced segments, and custom variables.
Event Tracking Ideas
- Checkout errors and alerts.
- Video plays
- Button Clicks
- File Downloads
- Content Scroll Analysis
- Site Exits
Custom Variable Ideas
- Social entrants
- Blog post author
- Blog post year
- Repeat purchaser
- Logged in/ member
Custom Alert Ideas
- Traffic drops
- Bounce rate increases
- Conversion drops
- Long tail traffic drops
Roll Up Accounts
Cross Domain accounts can get very complicated. Don’t forget to create secondary trackers and make sure you are matched up exactly across domains. The Google Analytics Chrome debugger is a great test tool to ensure that everything has been set up correctly. Filters can be set up within Google Analytics to view data separately for each domain.
Multi-Channel Funnels
The first thing you should do is create your own channel for branded and non-branded organic terms. A helpful hint that Mike mentioned during his presentation is that ‘t.co’ is registering as a referral in stock channels – this is the default setting and this should be changed in order to ensure that the data is being reflected accurately for Social Media.
During his presentation, Mike mentioned ‘not provided data’. This missing data can be ignored or extrapolated. Extrapolating data is imprecise and untrustworthy. Ignoring the missing data is the best thing you can do. It is better to have less data than questionable data.
