Google Analytics Real Time – Fun Gimmick or Useful Tool?

Posted in Analytics, Google on November 29th, 2011 by Matthew Read

For online marketing professionals, online businesses and pretty much anyone with a website, Google Analytics is one of the most important tools at their disposal. For years now it has allowed people to easily see how much traffic they are getting to their site, how users have arrived at their site and how people are behaving once they are on their site.

However, one criticism that has often been raised against Google Analytics, mainly by rival software companies, is that it is not in Real Time and there is a delay between activity on site and it registering in Analytics.

Real Time Analytics

Well Google has now come out with a new Real Time update that shows Analytic users exactly how many people are currently on their website, what pages they are currently viewing, what country they are visiting the website from and how long they have currently been on the website.

On the surface this sounds like a revolutionary new aspect to Google Analytics as it brings a new dimension to how users can view the data they are gathering from their website. But is it actually useful or just a fun PR stunt?

Google Gimmick

Don’t get me wrong, Real Time Analytics is fascinating to watch, as you can see in Real Time as people come on and fall of your website and at what point they do so, but this is just a small amount of data over a minute or so and it would be foolish to base any new website alterations or data conclusions on such a small amount of analysis.

The other 2 options are to sit and watch the Real Time Analytics all day to gather enough data to come to a useful conclusion on user activity or use the normal analytics to look at the previous day, week, month or year in an instant and use that to base your changes on. Now I don’t run our company but I’m pretty sure my boss would prefer me quickly looking at the last month worth of data as opposed to sitting at watching Real Time Analytics update all day long.

Useful Tool

However, although I think that Real Time Analytics is useless for any in-depth analysis, there is still one or two situations in which I think it could be useful. For example, if you want to see the immediate impact of a Tweet, Email Shot or new Blog Post etc, you can use the Real Time feature to see if it has lead to an instant increase in traffic to the website and how long that increase lasts for.

This could be especially useful with Social Media campaigns as it will help gather information about what is the best time to Tweet and the impact of different types of Tweets, e.g. ones containing @mentions, Re-Tweets or just plain links.

But, having said this, I still think that the idea of sitting and watching Real Time Analytics will lead to no real groundbreaking analytical conclusions but rather just waste time watching it go round. It does answer a lot of critics of Google analytics and offers a new perspective for monitoring social interaction, but Google Analytics most useful purpose is in-depth analysis of site performance, which I think we already had and do still have available to us with the original Analytics data.

Using ‘Revenue-per-click’ in Google Analytics to Assess the Effectiveness of your AdWords Campaign

Posted in Adwords, Analytics, PPC on May 7th, 2010 by Angelina

Let’s take care of the basics first. To be able to use ‘Revenue-per-click’, you will need to have set up goals within Google Analytics (GA) and assigned a value to each goal set up. The value of a goal is the revenue a conversion on that goal brings to you. You can set goal values during the goal set up process or return to the ‘Profile Settings’ page to assign/edit values to existing goals.

Revenue per click is calculated as follows: Goal Value x Conversion Rate.

As such, ‘Revenue-per-click’ (RPC) simply allocates a value to every paid click.

Comparing what you earned per click to your average CPC will give you a quick indication on the profitability of a given keyword. As such, RPC can help you to identify ‘problem’ keywords that may be adversely affecting your campaign.

Example:

If you receive 10 clicks on a keyword and 2 goal conversions at £20, your revenue per click is

£20 x 20% = £4

i.e. each click is worth £4.

What does this tell me?

It tells you that if your website keeps converting at 20%, then you break-even at an average CPC of £4 on a conversion of £20 value.

However, if your average CPC for the keyword is £5, then you are spending £1 more for every click than you are earning from it. Therefore, you’ll effectively be making a loss of £1 with every click on your ad.

Conversely, if your average CPC is £3, then you’re making £1 in profit per click.

How to view ‘Revenue-per-click’ reports:

1. Log in to your GA account.

2. From the side navigation panel, select ‘Traffic Sources’, then select AdWords^Beta.

3. Select an option from the sub-menu to look at data in an overview or by campaigns (click on campaign name on the right-hand side to get data for the campaign ad groups), keywords, day parts, etc.

4. From the main view on-screen, select the ‘Clicks’ tab and find the RPC column on the right-hand side in the main view.

How do you make a loss-making keyword profitable?

a) Lower your average CPC. However, do bear in mind that significantly lower ad positions might also affect your conversion rate, thereby negating any potentially positive affect. Hence, we advise that if your average CPC is higher than your RPC, you should try lowering your CPC gradually to find the ‘sweet spot’ which is where your keyword spends less enough per click but still converts at an acceptably high rate to start earning profits for you.

Alternatively, you can try to lower your average CPC by improving your keyword Quality Score. In the earlier example, you were converting on a keyword at 20%, earning £4 per click. If your average CPC on that keyword was £5, you were making a loss of £1 per click. If you can improve the Quality Score of the keyword, you may find that you can reduce your bids without necessarily dropping down to a lower ad position.

b) Improve your site conversion rate. You might do this by testing new landing pages, forms etc.

These methods can be tried alone but it is generally a good idea to try both (together or one-by-one) for best results.

What if I do not have goal conversion values, only target CPAs?

No problem. Just use your target CPAs as goal values in your GA account/profiles. All you have to do is work to break even.

A Word of Warning…

Before undertaking a major optimisation project make sure that you have a representative data set to balance out any peaks/troughs due to external factors.

Also, it is important to bear in mind that availability of granular data like GA makes possible can lead you to create an ‘over-optimised’ campaign that converts at fantastic rates and with low costs, but fails to deliver sufficient volume. A good adwords campaign will strike the balance between driving cost-effective leads/sales and driving volume.

Using Google Analytics Filters to Remove Session IDs from URLs

Posted in Analytics, PPC, SEO on March 3rd, 2010 by Hannah

One of the great things about working online is that you can track and monitor virtually anything and everything. That is of course, as long as you have some sort of analytics package set up. We use Google Analytics for most of our clients. It a pretty powerful solution (when used correctly), and of course has the added advantage of being completely free… and we all like free, right?

Google Analytics is pretty easy to set up – you simply need to insert a small snippet of code into every page of your website. However, there are certain instances whereupon URL structure can adversely affect the data which you get out of the package.

For example, if you want to monitor conversions through your website via Google Analytics, the easiest way is to set up goals and funnels.

Goals are very easy to set up – all you need to do is insert the URL which all users who complete the goal hit. For example – if you were looking to track purchases, you’d probably use the ‘thank you’ page URL which users hit once the goal is completed.

Funnels are simply the steps a user has to go through in order to complete a goal. So, again taking our purchase example; step one might be a page where the user completes their name and address; step two might be where they insert their payment details; step three might be the confirm purchase page; and step four might be the thank you for purchasing page.

All of this sounds simple enough; however, you are reliant on all users hitting the same pages. Which, if a site uses Session IDs can be a problem…

We came across one such example a couple of weeks ago. We won ourselves a lovely new insurance client. Like many they were using a white label quote engine. Not unusually, the quote engine utilised dynamically generated session IDs. Ordinarily this isn’t a problem as the URLs are typically configured as follows:

www.website.co.uk/quote-form/step-one.html?uniquesessionid

These types of session IDs are simply ignored by Google Analytics, and as such you can get aggregated data on all of the users who viewed www.website.co.uk/quote-form/step-one.html – this means you can track conversions by setting up goals and funnels as normal.

However on this particular site the URLs were configured as follows:

www.website.co.uk/quote-form/uniquesessionid/step-one.html

As such a new URL was being dynamically generated for each user. This was causing problems in Google Analytics, making it impossible to track conversions via goals and funnels in the usual way.

However, there’s a nice little work around – by using a filter you can solve the problem:

Let’s use this URL as an example: www.website.co.uk/quote-form/uniquesessionid/step-one.html

Login to your analytics account, however rather than clicking on ‘view reports’ click on ‘edit’.
You’ll be taken to your profile setting page
Click on add filter
Give your new filter an appropriate name
Select ‘Custom filter’
Select ‘Search and Replace’
From the Filter Field drop down list, select Request URI
In the Search String box insert: quote-form/.*/
In the Replace String box insert: quote-form/
Select ‘No’ for Case Sensitive
Hit ‘Save Changes’

Effectively this will filter out all of the Session IDs from the URLs – so rather than reporting on individual user’s URLs you will be able to view the data in aggregate, and set up goals and funnels as usual. Smart, huh?

Real Time Analytics

Google Gimmick

Useful Tool

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