26-1-2015

Grumpy Cat’s Guide to Google Analytics

Paul Raybould http://planonsoftware.com

Agenda

• Customising your homepage

• Audience - Overview

• Benchmarking

• Acquisition - Overview

• Report shortcuts and

email alerts

• Behaviour - Goals

• Behaviour - Attribution

• URL tracking

• Key Takeaways

Images courtesy of https://www.facebook.com/TheOfficialGrumpyCat

Wake me up when this is over

Customising your homepage

• Change the date range

• Switch mode

• ‘Favourite’ the sites of relevance to you to limit your view

• Please note: The monthly stats I circulate are specific to

countries NOT URL paths such as /nl, /uk etc

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Customising your homepage

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1. Change dates to view data

for a specific timeframe

2. ‘Favourite’ the sites of

interest by clicking the star icon

3. Limit your view to only sites of

interest by clicking the star icon

Audience - Overview

5

Should I be impressed by

these?

Audience

• Geo - look at where your users are coming from by

city/state (can be useful after a big event to see if it’s

driven much interest online)

• Behaviour – look at new vs returning to measure how

initiatives like the nurture programme affect visits

• Benchmarking – Google reintroduced this feature in

September 2014, allowing us to compare our website

performance against other industry verticals

6

Benchmarking returned late 2014

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We do better than

average in ‘Business &

Industrial’ sector for

driving traffic from email,

search and direct.

We score lower than

average for driving traffic

from social, display and

paid search – which

makes sense as we

haven’t yet launched

display or paid search.

Benchmarking returned late 2014

8

Our bounce rate is

28.97% against an

average of 55.65% in the

‘Business & Industrial’

vertical.

Having a low bounce rate

shows we’re driving the

right people to our site

and giving them the

content they want.

A low bounce rate also

helps with our organic

search engine rankings.

Acquisition - Overview

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Acquisition - Overview

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Acquisition - Overview

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If we’re advertising here then

it appears to be working well

Links on Wikipedia are

driving traffic as well as

helping our search engine

rankings

We should take a look at this

forum to see if there is a

discussion about Planon that

we should be aware of or

possibly respond to

Report shortcuts and email alerts

Images courtesy of https://www.facebook.com/TheOfficialGrumpyCat

That’s just what I need, more

emails

From the top navigation of any

report you can create an email alert

or shortcut so that you can be sure

you’re comparing ‘like for like’ over

time

Behaviour – Site Content

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Particularly useful

to measure

performance of

landing pages for

any campaigns

you’re running

Behaviour – Site Search

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Knowing what words people are searching for on our site can help decide which

content to advertise on the homepage or new content to create if necessary

Conversion - Goals

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It’s not exactly the World Cup

now is it

Conversion - Attribution

“Marketing attribution provides a level of

understanding of what combination of events

influence individuals to engage in a desired

behavior.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_%28marketing%29

Images courtesy of https://www.facebook.com/TheOfficialGrumpyCat

Conversion - Attribution

Images courtesy of https://www.facebook.com/TheOfficialGrumpyCat

Conversion - Attribution

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URL Tracking

• Use Google’s URL Tracking service as an easy way to create tracked links

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en

• There’s a URL ‘tracking cheat sheet’ on the J drive J:\departments\Marketing\Policies & Procedures

• Make sure ‘source’ and ‘medium’ are included if you want to measure using the attribution models (list source as ‘Display’ to be captured as advertising in the attribution model)

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Key Takeaways

• Dig deeper in the ‘Acquisitions’ section to see which referral sites are driving traffic, especially if you’re paying for ad space

• Set up email alerts or shortcuts of useful reports so you can easily access them in future

• Look at the ‘Site Content’ report in the ‘Behaviour’ section to see which campaign landing pages have high traffic

• Use the ‘Site Search’ report in the ‘Behaviour’ section to inform your content plans

• Monitor ‘Downloaded Something (Goal 1)’ to see how well traffic on your site is converting to leads

• Use attribution models to see the real impact of your campaigns beyond just first or last click

• Use the online tool to create tracked URLs so you can really measure the influence of your campaigns

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Questions?