Back in December, in a blog post written by one of my colleagues, myself and a few other WebpageFX-ers made commitments to specific internet marketing New Years Resolutions for 2013. My resolution? To ‘experiment’ with advanced analytics reporting techniques for more useful and leads-driven data. In a nutshell, my resolution touches on one very obvious analytics topic: user segmentation. While my goal highlights an entire baseline of the Google Analytics system (custom reporting), the underlying focus all along was to better manage my data.

Since declaring my resolution, my goal has been to delve a little deeper into Analytics each day to learn something new. And isn’t the point of our work as marketers anyway? While website reporting and analysis comes in the form of aggregate data (number of visits, average visit duration, etc.), user segmentation allows you to understand the behavior of segments of your customers, providing you the ability to form actionable insights by focusing on the ‘specifics’ rather than the ‘whole.’

Are you interested in better managing your data? Here a few best practice tips to help you get started with user segmentation:

Get to Know Your Industry First Before Anything Else

Although this is pretty obvious, as an Internet marketer, your job is to best understand the industry you’re competing in and how that competition fits within your business goals and objectives. Doing some initial research will ultimately help you find answers through analytics strategies. Finding the answers to these initial questions will set the stage for your appreciation and understanding of how analytical data can help grow your business.

Look before you leap. Understand your market and the trends that influence your business. A good starting point would be to check what your competitors are doing, and plan to do it better! Example: If you find yourself questioning a viable budget for a pay-per-click campaign, services like Alexa or SEM Rush allow you receive competitors’ data by inputting their web address. While it’s likely that this data is not 100% accurate, the research does provide a nice starting block for meeting your objectives in future opportunities.

Gather Your Data and Begin ‘Clustering’

After you’ve defined your business’ goals and their need for segmentation techniques to meet those goals, it’s time to begin doing the dirty work by gathering and segmenting the data, which involves a technique called ‘clustering.’ Clustering involves generating data segments to produce powerful information that can be acted upon. Clusters allow us to identify customers that have similar purchasing intentions, site interactions, regional visitation and other behaviors, to name a few. When analyzing segmented data, be sure to note 1) if it’s providing insightful information into solving a business problem and 2) if it’s enough data to warrant an immediate change to your marketing plan, or if it’s simply one to consider for the time being.

Think of clusters like a custom dashboard in Google Analytics. By creating custom widgets that compare site metrics versus dimensions, we’re able to move past aggregate data and gain footing into new business perspectives and opportunities.

Are you noticing an increase in site traffic in other countries besides your home country? Information such as this could assist in developing a new strategy targeted to those regions separately, possibly via a language component built into your website or a custom email marketing campaign.

Keep Your Data Fresh and Up-To-Date

As you begin using the data you’ve gathered to make executive business decisions, increased demand from your superiors for more data will require you to keep all information up to date and accurate.

In certain industries, new products are launched everyday and site traffic trends are bound to change over time. To keep your segmentation model up to date, streamline your operational process by clustering new data on a regularly basis to fit within the scope of your project (i.e., weekly, bi-weekly, monthly). Example: Set up an email option in Google Analytics that will send you a new traffic report within a specific frequency (see image below). Overall, systematic reviews of new data sets will keep the analytical wheels turning to continue to improve on the business decision process.

Find Value for Business Opportunities

Now that you’ve defined the objectives, gathered and segmented data on a regular basis, it’s time to provide the underlying value of your efforts. What you do with the data, i.e., how innovative you are at using the information you gather, will serve as a means to helping business individuals act upon insights that would otherwise be difficult to piece together.Through segmentation strategies, marketers are better able to understand the needs and wants of their consumer, making these data-driven insights that much more real to those who need to use them.

Provide data that can be readily understood and acted upon. Example: If you find that 75% of your sales or leads are coming from organic traffic in a particular region in the United States, show upper management how it will be more beneficial for you to rethink the business’ existing PPC strategy and switch it up for a new strategy (possibly SEO) to influence more business in that region, and hopefully beyond.

Finding new business opportunities through segmentation conveys expertise in your job, true attention to detail, and of course, added value for the business.

Now Get Out There and Being Analyzing

While this blog post doesn’t cover all of the immense capabilities that user segmentation can provide for many different marketing campaigns, it does highlight some important tips to consider when analyzing data sets. Because it is truly advanced analytics, be sure to be mindful of your own abilities in this area and do your research before taking a gander.

Feel free to consult this article for more background into the world of user/behavioral segmentation. It provides a great overview for any analytical strategy, not just for Google Analytics reporting, and is the sole inspiration for this post.

All in all, the lessons you learn here can be the cornerstone for finding a balance between what your customers want and what you want to achieve for the business. In order to create this win-win situation, focus on these tips: understand and research the industry you’re working in, what are the areas of strategic focus, and then segment away! Good luck!

Photo by Matt Law

Outside of the web, the marketing world has an endless list of tools to help us communicate with our audience. Each medium has its own strengths which give them an advantage over others. Many marketing budgets are devoting more and more to the web as it is one of the most effective and efficient forms of marketing in the business world. From ecommerce sales to brand community growth, using the web to achieve marketing and business objectives consistently returns one of the highest ROIs out of the many forms of marketing you can invest in.

I obviously sound like a total fan boy for web, and I am! However, I believe that all forms of advertising have a purpose and are important in your marketing mix and achieving company goals. Like a balanced retirement plan, your marketing efforts should be well diversified.  For example, a well-placed billboard can be a powerful tool for branding and all marketers love a good old fashioned street team guerilla marketing tactic for a buzz-provoking result.

While the traditional marketing examples above can be effective, they make it difficult to quantify the total impact they have on your business. This is an issue we see in many offline marketing campaigns. Metrics is the one area where online marketing leaves other channels in the dust. You can measure online marketing with great detail, and understand what is most effective for your marketing dollar. This is valuable for any business, but can be especially valuable to a small business that doesn’t have an endless marketing budget like a major retail brand. Small businesses need to know how every dollar is working for them.

Bridging the Offline – Online Gap.

Tracking offline marketing with Google Analytics? This can be easier than you think! It is a concept that can make a huge impact on marketing analysis when it is implemented properly. It is also very much underutilized in the marketing world!

Some items can be accomplished on your own, some may need a little web programmer love and others might inevitably involve pulling in an agency since they’ll have tons of experience with the process. However, every business should be able to implement one of these concepts in some form.

…View Full Story

[photo by sean dreilinger]

Bounce! Go ahead … it’s okay!

That’s right, I said it – Bounce!

The term “Bounce” or “Bounce Rate” has a negative connotation surrounding it when referring to site analytics. There are many instances when bounces are a typical aspect of traffic however, and it’s (gasp!) not always a bad thing.

Types of Content

Before you even begin looking at your analytics, it’s important to understand what type of visitor you are driving to your site, the anticipated lifecycle of these visitors and your actual goals for these pages.

Blogs – It is common for visitors to blogs to bounce. Many visitors find a link to a blog post from a blog they frequent; they visit the link, view the blog post and simply close it out. Now if you have a lot of valuable content and internal links in your blog post that refer to related content on the same topic found within your blog; you MIGHT be able to get visitors to travel further into your blog – but otherwise it’s the normal course of action.

Image Sharing, Image Galleries, etc. – If your site is mostly images or heavily relies on traffic from Google Images or people who are searching for images to view then it is likely your visitors will bounce. They will search on Google images or some sort of image search, view the image you have available and then bounce. They will likely return back to the image results of their original search and then continue to view other images on other sites. Now, if you add related images, similar images or can group images by a topic there is a SLIGHT chance you can get visitors to click on other images and continue through your site; otherwise it is again a normal course of action for this type of visitor.

Flash Sites – If your site is a full flash site, then it is possible the entire site loads on one page. Even if they load and / or look at 10 pages within the flash movie it still only counts as one page view and eventually a bounce. Setting up advanced analytics pageview tracking will help you get a more accurate understanding of what visitors are doing on flash sites.

Comparison Shopping – If you’re driving traffic into your site for specific products and the terms visitors are using are closer to the buying cycle, visitors may come in to get information, gather pricing and spec data and bounce to compare pricing on other sites that are listed. This is common, but doesn’t necessarily mean that particular visitor didn’t come back and eventually make a purchase; it’s simply part of the process for this type of visitor in this stage of the buying cycle.

Videos – People love videos, and it’s a great way to drive traffic into your site (if you have them properly optimized!). Someone who clicked on the link to your video from search results is highly likely to watch the video, click the back button and then return to their search results to watch more videos. You may be able to pair the video up with related videos, articles, products and / or solutions that work well with the video and the visitor’s search; but other than that, it is likely this type of visitor will ultimately bounce.

Meeting Your Visitors’ Expectations Before They Bounce

There is the old frame of mind still lingering on the net that says “if I can drive them to my site, I can make them convert”. Unfortunately, this is far from true. In the Ecommerce world, there are terms that are meant to convert and terms that are not meant to convert (initially). Both understanding the visitor’s expectations and meeting those expectations when the visitor lands on your site are the only ways to ultimately get the sale.

Below I will go into a few advanced steps that should be taken to have a more successful organic and paid search marketing campaign by lowering your site’s bounce rate wherever possible.

Review Your Site – Look at your site and each of its pages on a page-by-page basis and determine what each page offers, its own goals separately and its role within the entire site.

Assign Keywords Based On Expectation– On a keyword-by-keyword basis, determine the possible expectations of a visitor making a search using a specific keyword.

Users’ Intent – Users have actions they wish to carry out when performing a search. You want the page you selected within your site to match up with the actions the users wish to carry out when searching a specific keyword.

Setup Analytics – Once you have determined the three areas above, make use of the goals function in Google Analytics to setup goals and funnels based on your findings. Use the available information to gauge how accurate you were and make the needed adjustments to increase performance.

Review analytics –Review your goals and ensure they include all the possible variations of goals for your site. Review the keywords that are driving traffic to your site. When looking at how to better an existing campaign and for actionable data, simply work backwards.

Landing Pages – Review your landing pages and what keywords are driving traffic to that landing page. Ask yourself a few questions: does this landing page meet the user’s intention? Would a better page within the site provide a better user experience? Is there a gap between what my content offers and what my site offers?

Keywords – If visitors are landing on a page that doesn’t match up with what they were expecting to find, work on transferring that traffic to the appropriate page. Search engines aren’t as smart as humans; just because the search engines have determined they have the right page to rank for a certain keyword, doesn’t mean they are right.

Content Strategy – Create a content strategy based on any area within your site that is lacking and how you could better meet your visitors’ expectations.

Remember: obtaining traffic for a competitive term can be difficult and maintaining that position may be even harder; but to drive traffic into a page that doesn’t meet the users’ expectations where they end up bouncing for the wrong reason makes all your hard work and effort futile.

When building pages for your site, make sure you understand the purpose of that page and base its performance based on that goal. Then brainstorm ideas to help improve and increase that goal.

When looking at your analytics, remember you can’t just look at bounce rates and make good decisions without considering the primary intention of that page, why it was built in the first place and how it is used by your visitors.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I love to look at visual representations of my analytics data whenever possible. Line graphs, pie charts, scatter charts…they all do a pretty good job of presenting data in a relational way. But wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to visualize your data and then interact directly with the results over time to dynamically discover unique patterns and trends? Well, you’re in luck because there is! It’s a powerful feature within Google Analytics called motion charts.

Motion Chart plotting Visits, Bounce Rate, E-commerce Conversion Rate & Revenue

Motion charts allow for the analysis of large amounts of data across several parameters and provide a powerful way to visualize that data in five dimensions (x-axis, y-axis, size and color of dots representing data points, and time). In fact, technically, it’s even possible to increase the chart to deal with eight dimensions if you select combination metrics (e.g., conversion rate, bounce rate, and pages per visit).

Now for those of you who have some advanced experience using Google Analytics, the value of motion charts may not be that big of a revelation…after all, it’s been an available feature of Google Analytics for some time now. But for the rest of you, motion charts can be a valuable tool in search marketing as it helps to point out some critical data patterns and relationships you might otherwise have overlooked.

What metrics to use on the motion chart?

You’ll want to first understand the objectives as it relates to your website and thereby the metrics that should be used to measure and improve upon these objectives. The other area to determine is whether your site is an e-commerce site or not. E-commerce sites make interpreting the data a little bit more intuitive because you’re dealing with metrics such as e-commerce conversion rate and revenue as it relates back to keywords that are either paid, non-paid (organic) or both.

Below, we’ll look at an e-commerce scenario where we may want to observe traffic-driving keywords which have the best conversion rates along with pointing out areas to improve on regarding keyword optimization.

We’ll start by navigating to the Keywords report under the Traffic Sources of Google Analytics. From there, we have the option of setting some parameters such as the keyword medium (whether or not we want to view paid keywords, non-paid (organic) keywords, or both), time range, the number of keywords to include (defined here as rows – the more rows you include the greater number of points on your motion chart), and any filtering options (useful when you want to analyze branded keywords exclusive from non-branded keywords).

Once you’re ready, simply click on the “Visualize” button in the upper left area of the report. Google Analytics will then generate the motion chart accordingly. It’s important to keep in mind that the motion chart data is defined from the report where it was initiated…in the case of our example, that’s the Keywords report.

Click the Visualize button to access the motion charts

Next, we’ll set the x-axis to show us Bounce Rate and the y-axis to show us Visits. The size of the dot should represent Revenue while the color of the dot should be set to represent the E-commerce Conversion Rate.

NOTE: If e-commerce tracking is not enabled for your site, you won’t see related metrics such as E-commerce Conversion Rate and Revenue. Instead you may want to set the size of the dot to be Per Visit Goal Value and the color of the dot to be Goal Conversion Rate.

What can our metrics show us?

The Visits metric simply shows the amount of visits for each keyword.

Bounce Rate shows the percentage of bounces for each keyword. This is very helpful since it can help demonstrate whether or not a keyword matches the expectation a user might have when they arrive on your landing page. In addition, by analyzing bounce rate trends for keywords, we get a feel for landing pages that may be under-performing.

• WHAT TO LOOK FOR: Here you’ll want to look for dots that are plotted farther along the x-axis…especially ones that are large or red.
• WHAT TO IMPROVE: You’ll want to optimize the landing pages for these particular keywords.

E-commerce/Goal Conversion Rate shows your keyword conversion rate and this is important to plot because it can point out keywords that are highly converting but that aren’t receiving a high level of traffic.

• WHAT TO LOOK FOR: Look for small, red dots located close to the x-axis as these are the keywords which should get the most attention from any optimization efforts.
• WHAT TO IMPROVE: Increase these keywords’ exposure on your website and focus on these within any of your PPC campaigns.

Revenue/Per Visit Goal Value shows the amount of money each keyword drives to your website.

• WHAT TO LOOK FOR: The large, blue dots are the ones to focus on here as that indicates that while the keyword brings a decent level of revenue to your site, if converting better, it could bring even more.
• WHAT TO IMPROVE: Optimize the pages related to these keywords in order to improve the conversion.

TIP: Check the boxes next to any of the keywords on the right side of the chart to enable Google Analytics to tag their respective dots for a quick and easy way to pick them out of the crowd.

Earlier, I mentioned there was a fifth dimension, “Time.” Well, here’s the cool part of the motion chart (as if motion charts weren’t already cool) and how it gets its name. Below the chart is a slider that allows you to view the data interactively as it relates to time (based on the date range you set for your report). Move this slider from left to right and you’ll begin to see how your keywords do over the data range you’ve set. This adds some very interesting layers to the patterns and trends you’ll be able to discern. For example, if you notice the conversion rate for a certain keyword goes up during a particular time of the year, you may want to consider investing more PPC dollars for that keyword during that time period.

TIP: Check the “Trails” checkbox in the lower-right corner of the chart to maintain a visual path of each selected dot as it moves through your timeline.

For those of you who hadn’t yet discovered the power of utilizing motion charts to better analyze data and reveal previously unnoticed patterns and trends, I hope this has helped convince you of their value as another go-to tool in your ongoing SEO improvement efforts. And keep in mind that motion charts are available for most reports within Google Analytics that show tables. So now get out there and improve your SEO keyword targeting…Happy charting!