https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/events?id=yoursiteID

To all those wondering if historical data is being recorded by Google even though its not yet visible in your accounts…yes it is. I installed event tracking on a website without it yet being available in the analytics profile and it’s recorded back at least 4 months since we first included it in the HTML.

<!– Start of Google Analytics Code –>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.”
: “http://www.”); document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost +
“google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-26676-4″); pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();</script>
<!– End of Google Analytics Code –>

This is an example of the tracking code that runs on each and every page of the website to enable Google to track user’s movements. Note: The user must have Javascript enabled to run this code.

This shows an overview of the traffic on Swansea.info for the period 1st September 2008 until 1st October 2008. The traffic does fluctuate quite a lot day by day but there is a reasonably consistent trend over the time period.
It also reports on Visits (9319), Page Views (24,239), Page views per user visit (2.60), Bounce Rate (58.42% and is how many times a visitors lands on a page and leave straight away without looking at another page on the website.

A recent article by (Dainow, 2008) says “Google Analytics should not count a bounce as a visit”. But that is how a lot of people use web sites: they enter a specific search in to Google and hit each item of the search results in turn. Just because people do not go beyond the entry page does not mean it is not a useful visit. Maybe the author is focused on conversion-funded rather than ad-funded sites. Omniture’s HBX analytics counts bounces as visits and it is fair for Google Analytics to do the same. That said, he is right about Google Analytics artificially deflated visit-time stats. Google counts a bounce as a visit of zero-seconds duration and includes it when calculating average visit duration. Omniture HBX simply ignores bounces in the visit duration calculation. This means HBXs average visit time is always higher (and more sensible) than Google’s – especially where the bounce percentage is high.

It also reports on the average amount of time a user spends looking at the content (1minute 37 seconds) and also what percentage of the traffic are new visitors in this case 78.91% will not have seen the site previously in the reported period.

This shows the statistics from the site search report in Google Analytics.

The CSE will index 100% of the sites content if provided via an XML feed (Google has 2 indexes, 1 for regular search and one for its Custom Search Engines). This was the easiest way to gather user search data and didn’t involve developing a search function. The benefit of using the CSE is the results are algorithmically generated not just a simple SQL query based search, this results in far better targeted results.

Site Search is of great value to copywriters and web masters. Being able to understand the user when engineering information architecture is a crucial step in the future success of a website and one of those steps is analysing Site Search.

The data is usually quite difficult to come by as the information contains sensitive business information. If you have a similar website in the same market, this insight gave an understanding of what the user expected to see from the Mumbles.co.uk brand. Based on those results determined the information architecture for the new Citys.info internet franchise and what order to put on channels i.e. Hotels, Restaurants, Bars, and Beaches. Instead of offering content which the user might not have wanted to read by understanding the site search results it gave a voice to the user. By further analysing site search data, it will give good content suggestions which otherwise might not have been thought of. This is effectively a vertical search marketing and content suggestion tool in the hands of every webmaster.

With a first page ranking on a generic term such as “Mumbles Hotels” or “Mumbles” the user is at stage one of their search and although reasonably narrowed down to Hotels in Mumbles they might be open to 3 or even 5 star accommodation and are likely to look through multiple pages before they find their desired outcome.

Take the 6 search terms below mumbles, the mumbles, China China Swansea, mumbles Swansea, Mumbles Wales and mumbles hotels. Each tells a very different story about that user’s interest in the content based on the data available.

The keyword “Mumbles Hotels” is a reasonably generic term although the user has narrowed down a place and a product they still have the type of product such as 3 or 5 star hotels. It is fair to say that user would look through a variety of hotels listed on the website before they made their decision. It appears given the level of page views for that term at 7.46 per visit that is the case. Also note the very low bounce rate at 8.24%. So 92.76% of users look at more than 1 page of content on that search term.

Bounce rate is a very good indicator of how users react to the content offering when initially put in front of them. That search term would also suggest that the user is in “buying mode” and is thinking about conducting a transaction so giving them “call to actions” to send the hotels an enquiry would be a good idea on this content.

This shows the top keywords and associated data driving traffic to Mumbles.co.uk

The keyword “china china Swansea” (the name of a Chinese restaurant) gives a very different insight in to those particular users’ intentions. The low page views per visit at 2.18 suggests a very short visit and from the average time at 56 seconds that is true. The bounce rate is the highest in the list likewise the percentage of traffic that is a new visitor.

When the page is analysed the intentions of the user become clear. The page in question is a listings page for the restaurant and contains information like address and telephone number for reservations.

China China had a very poor launch strategy when the restaurant was opened and took over 6 months for any listings to appear in the likes of Yellow Pages or Yell.com. The listings on Mumbles.co.uk have been online since day one of the restaurant opening and were indexed by Google shortly after.

Being first with information is a helpful step in ranking well in any search engine: industry leaders will often have information first and Google will reward with good listings. The search engines are also in competition with each other after all if the user consistently finds more up to date information else where there is the potential for them to swap search engines.

Even different search engines will return a different type of user. This shows Google, although driving vastly more traffic to Mumbles.co.uk, users from Yahoo are far more engaged with the content and look at 21% more pages than an average Google user. Yahoo also delivers traffic which does not bounce as much as Google.

Understanding users and how they are interacting with content allows for informed decisions about potential strategy changes such as content or more relevant links around the content. For example with a restaurant page on Swansea.info a SQL query is run which generates 6 restaurants underneath the listing so it is easy for the user to move onto related content, the more targeted the options the more likely they are to click on it. This also gave a great opportunity to develop a good internal linking strategy on Swansea.info around the restaurants channel.

Giving users related content to generate page views is completely the opposite of websites which operate on a conversion basis (CPA – cost per acquisition). The last thing a CPA business model wants is for users to be distracted from the goal, usually financial (also known as the conversion funnel) so the closer the user comes to the end result, the less options are available to navigate away

Unless data is available documenting how the website is performing, how can the internet franchise owners be expected to sell against that data. Savvy advertisers will easily be able to trip up a site owner about facts and figures and quote competitors information if they have not been shown how to interpret the site KPIs and analytics data.

Recording data about the sites performance over a period of time allowed for trending information to be analysed such as brand specific traffic. This might give an inclination of how a specific area was performing on the wider tourism map then by looking at the sector as a whole this might be a common trend. As seen below there is a gradual rise from March peaking at the school holidays and Easter and reaching a peak again in July when the schools finish for their summer holidays falling off dramatically in early September. This is a classic tourism yearly trend model for any UK seaside resort.

One of the great things about an online business is its ability to be measured and during the development of the Citys.info internet franchise some advanced uses of Google analytics were implemented to try and measure KPIs on a site wide level from accommodation enquiries right through to premium advert performance.

In Google Analytics there is a function to create “Goals”. Goals are achievements that have been made based on a set of pre defined variables. Maybe a user clicked on a call to action they can then be measured against an older version of that same call to action or maybe a user has clicked on a form and made a hotel reservation. As well as goals these are also known as conversions. The website converted someone to do something and it has been tracked in the analytics.

Conversion tracking can take many forms and become very complicated for example if the keyword “Majorca Holidays” is bought via Google Adwords taking the user to holiday information page for Majorca. Although all the functionality and call to action might be there for the user to complete that booking transaction they may just be researching the market to see what is available and what prices are like. This research may go on for weeks maybe months until the user finally navigates their way back to the original keyword they used some period of time ago and bought the holiday, this is known as an assisted keyword conversion and requires complex tracking software usually in the form of a cookie (a text file assigned to a users browser triggered by visiting a web page).

With Citys.info due to the nature of the content and the lack of paid traffic it is not really necessary to track the conversion down to that granular level. It is important to track hotel enquiries to individual hotels and hotel content in general purely from a sales perspective in giving customers an update on how their listing is performing. At a top level, looking at all the hotels on the website and to get a total number of enquiries for any given time frame some event tracking can be configured in Google analytics.

We have worked extensively with Citys.info to implement KPI measurement to a very granular level. Get in touch to see how we can help you.

New Google Analytics Tracking Code

var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));

try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-xxxxxxx-1″);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}

Old Google Analytics Tracking Code

var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”); document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-xxxxxxx-1″);
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();

Google TV Ads Tracking

Google TV Ads is a flexible, all-digital system for buying more accountable and measurable TV advertising. Using the familiar AdWords interface, you can launch a TV advertising campaign in minutes.

Google Audio Ads Tracking

Nearly a quarter (22%) of Internet users make purchases after searching for something they learned about on the radio, so you can easily increase the overall impact of your online ad campaigns by running Audio Ads at the same time.

Learn more »

With Google AdWords, you can launch radio ad campaigns and track the resulting traffic and conversions — all from within your AdWords account.”

If you have recently acquired a new business whether thats in the online tourism sector or any other there’s always going to be some surprise invoices coming through the door for services and business listings that you may never of heard of let alone know how well they are performing.

So how do you measure these different sources of marketing spend?

If it’s offline it’s notoriously difficult to measure how effective one stream of spend has been over another. Maybe you took out a full page spread with a local magazine or have invested heavily in a TV advertising campaign, both are nearly impossible to measure. Unless you ask each person who walks into your hotel or buys your latest music CD where they heard of you, you’re not going to be able to offset that person against your marketing spend.

In the online world we have the ability to trace that individual user to see where exactly they came from and we can attribute a value to that sources overall cost. Tools such as Google Analytics or Omniture can accomplish this task well. If you’re able to get a trial period with a particular advertiser you’ll be able to see very quickly through your stats how well an advert is performing by looking in the referral sources.

Its all well and good driving traffic to your site but you then need to look deeper and see how those users behave and how well they convert whether thats page views per visit (usually for display advertising) or the value of their transaction (shopping cart).

Being able to effectively measure your online marketing spend will save you money and free tools like Google analytics make sure you only target those businesses that will work hard for you and the ones that don’t…well you’ll be able to see that far sooner rather than later.